Optical crosstalk means that all spectra on an image are required in order to optimally extract any one spectrum. If fibers on an image are shared among multiple programs, how are the raw data to be distributed while preserving proprietary information? Note that the raw data includes both the pixels from the spectrograph cameras as well as the pfsConfig file.
Some potential options are:
1. Only distribute pipeline-extracted spectra. Only distribute the raw pixels once the proprietary periods for all fibers on the image have passed. The quality of the distributed spectra is limited by the quality of the pipeline (it might be necessary to rerun the extractions on all data when we find important bugs).
2. Attempt to censor the data. This might be done by masking or by subtracting the extracted spectra from the raw pixels, and manipulating the pfsConfig. Any extraction from the censored raw data would not have access to all the data, and therefore would not be able to reach the quality level of the pipeline operating on the original raw data, while also being dependent upon the quality of the pipeline (depending on how we do the censoring, it might be necessary to rerun the censoring on all data when we find important bugs).
3. Do nothing and trust users not to look at fibers other than their own.