Press release: Put the Consumer First and Focus on What is Important

July 11, 2012 San Diego, California — Today the World Privacy Forum published a comment essay by executive director Pam Dixon urging all privacy stakeholders to focus on the consumer during the Commerce Multistakeholder privacy process, set to get underway tomorrow. “We must put the consumer first and focus on what is important,” said Pam Dixon.

The US Department of Commerce has chosen mobile app privacy as the first topic for which to create consumer privacy principles. “In mobile application privacy, that will mean assigning responsibility for privacy throughout the mobile hierarchy, from mobile wireless carriers to publishers to app portals to developers,” said Dixon.

The World Privacy Forum is interested in a positive dialogue that moves consumer privacy forward. From the essay: “There will be many points of disagreement among stakeholders, but perhaps, just perhaps, we can find this one point of agreement of putting the consumer first, and then moving millimeter by millimeter from there.”

The essay is available at https://www.worldprivacyforum.org. The World Privacy Forum will be attending and participating in the July 12 Mulitstakeholder process.

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Posted July 11, 2012 in Consumer Privacy, Essay, Mobile Privacy, News, Press, and Media, NTIA Multistakeholder Process, Self-regulation, U.S. Department of Commerce

New Report: Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new WPF report, “Risky Analysis: Assessing and Improving AI Governance Tools.” This report sets out a definition of AI governance tools, documents why and how these tools are critically important for trustworthy AI, and where these tools are around the world. The report also documents problems in some AI governance tools themselves, and suggests pathways to improve AI governance tools and create an evaluative environment to measure their effectiveness. AI systems should not be deployed without simultaneously evaluating the potential adverse impacts of such systems and mitigating their risks, and most of the world agrees about the need to take precautions against the threats posed. The specific tools and techniques that exist to evaluate and measure AI systems for their inclusiveness, fairness, explainability, privacy, safety and other trustworthiness issues — called in the report collectively AI governance tools – can improve such issues. While some AI governance tools provide reassurance to the public and to regulators, the tools too often lack meaningful oversight and quality assessments. Incomplete or ineffective AI governance tools can create a false sense of confidence, cause unintended problems, and generally undermine the promise of AI systems. The report contains rich background details, use cases, potential solutions to the problems discussed in the report, and a global index of AI Governance Tools.
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This comprehensive report and proposed bill text is focused on the Privacy Act of 1974, an important and early Federal privacy law that applies to the government sector and some contractors. The Privacy Act was written for the 1970s information era -- an era that was characterized by the use of mainframe computers and filing cabinets. Today's digital information era looks much different than the '70s: smart phones are smarter than the old mainframes, and documents are now routinely digitized and stored and perhaps even analyzed in the cloud, among many other changes. The report focuses on why the Privacy Act needs an update that will bring it into this century, and how that could look and work. This work was written by Robert Gellman, and informed by a two-year multi-stakeholder process.