Privacy Act of 1974

How New Procedural Controls Using the Privacy Act of 1974 Can Improve the Protections of Reproductive Health Information Held by Federal Agencies

September 2022 By Robert Gellman and Pam Dixon Download this Report Executive Summary This report suggests specific procedural and substantive ways that the Executive Branch can revise implementation of the Privacy Act of 1974 to restrict and more carefully administer some disclosures of reproductive health information by federal agencies to federal, state, and local law

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.

US Government 20th Joint Assessment Report, AG Guidelines, and more

There are many transparency documents that have been published relating to the US Intelligence Community. There are new updates to several key documents, which we have listed and linked below. While admittedly dense reading, these are key privacy-related documents relevant to US Government operations and activities and taken together, are an important resource. January 2021

WPF calls on Secretary of Homeland Security to provide formal notice and comment and address substantive concerns regarding the CBP biometric entry and exit program

The World Privacy Forum sent a detailed letter (PDF, 18 pages) September 18, 2018 to the Secretary of Homeland security outlining our substantive concerns regarding the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) biometric[1]entry and exit program. The World Privacy Forum[2]letter calls on the Secretary to provide formal

WPF comments on the DHS External Biometric Records database

The World Privacy Forum has submitted detailed comments on the US Department of Homeland Security’s External Biometric Records database (EBR database), which DHS describes as a large biometric and demographic database drawn from foreign and domestic sources. WPF has a number of concerns about the proposal, including that the EBR database is slated to be exempted from