Digital Privacy

Nov 01 2018

Dixon to address the United Nations on women and privacy

WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will address the United Nations on the issue of women and privacy, with a particular focus on how digital privacy issues impact women across the world. Dixon will be addressing delegates at the UN Headquarters in Vienna, Austria and will participate in a UN Women’s workshop where the theme of

Jul 16 2018

WPF Summer & Fall 2018 Privacy Events

WPF will be speaking and/or participating in the following events this summer and fall. Please join us, or let us know if you will be attending. Global Forum on Artificial Intelligence, Swiss Re Center for Global Dialogue, 9-10 July 2018. Zurich, Switzerland. Pam Dixon, WPF Executive Director, delegate. Europlace International Financial Forum, 11-12 July 2018.

Mar 13 2018

World Privacy Forum in the news: spring update

Here is a spring 2018 update on a selection of privacy stories WPF has been quoted in over the past few months, many of them quoting our work on privacy. For more articles, see our full World Privacy Forum in the News page. In you missed our recent posts on data ethics and our test of

Feb 12 2018

Testing out PriBot, the new AI privacy policy analysis chat bot

Today we took the new PriBot privacy policy analyzer and chat bot tool out for a test run. The PriBot chat bot uses AI to analyze privacy policies — many of which are verbally and legally complex — and returns bite-size nuggets of information to those interested. The overall impact of using the chat tool

Jan 11 2018

CES 2018

World Privacy Forum will be participating in the 2018 Consumer Electronics show in four main issue areas: blockchain and digital payments, biometrics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and digital health. Watch our blog for video and blog recaps of what we learned, what’s new, and what is just around the corner. CES 2018: January 7-11, 2018 Las

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.
National IDs Around the World — Interactive map

About this Data Visualization: This interactive map displays the presence...
Report: From the Filing Cabinet to the Cloud: Updating the Privacy Act of 1974

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.