encryption & privacy tools

Jan 03 2019

Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices: New consensus practices and tools from HHS

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has produced a set of cybersecurity resources for healthcare provider organizations from small to large. So far, HHS has published four documents: an overview report of cybersecurity issues and practices, two technical volumes, and a toolkit. The documents focus on what an expert multistakeholder consensus group determined to be the five most prevalent cybersecurity threats and the ten core cybersecurity practices. The practices are voluntary, and utilize the NIST cybersecurity framework. The documentation is based in reality, not conjecture, and the documents are not intended to sell any particular products for any particular vendor. This has allowed for a rich and helpful documentation of current challenges along with solutions. See our overview of the four new resources.

Apr 16 2018

WPF moderating seminar on GDPR & biometrics in Brussels, Belgium

WPF executive director Pam Dixon will be moderating a seminar to be held by the Biometrics Institute in Brussels, Belgium on 17 April on the topic of implications and implementation of the GDPR. The event will be held at the Office of the Spanish National Research Council, 7th Floor, Room 3, Rue du Trône 62,

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

Dec 14 2016

Top tips for people affected by the recent Yahoo security breach

On December 14 Yahoo announced a serious security breach in which sophisticated data attackers grabbed users’ answers to security questions, among other information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates. This breach is particularly worrisome because it culled sensitive information from 1 billion Yahoo customers, which makes this the largest data breach known to date. The

May 13 2015

Public comments: WPF encourages NIST to refine report on de-identification of personally identifiable information

The World Privacy Forum submitted comments today to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in response to its publication, Draft Report on De-Identification of Personally Identifiable Information (NISTIR 8053). The WPF welcomes the draft NIST report, as the area of de-identification and re-identification of personal data swirls with controversy and confusion. We see considerable value

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.