News Release: Updated Top Ten Opt Outs

August 15, 2013

WPF Announces Updated Consumer Opt-Out Resource

The World Privacy Forum is delighted to publish a new version of our Top Ten Opt Outs, a highly popular consumer resource online. We have continually published this guide for over xxx years. It has changed over time, as social media opt outs didn’t exist when we first wrote the guide.

The guide also contains crucially important financial opt outs for consumers. “While many people have heard about how to adjust their Facebook settings, many fewer have heard that they can opt out of pre-screened offers of credit and other financial opt outs,” said Pam Dixon. “Some of these are quite important over the long term.”

The new guide is available at https://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2013/08/consumer-tips-top-ten-opt-outs/

The Top Ten Opt Outs are:

1. National Do Not Call Registry

2. Prescreened offers of credit and insurance

3. DMA opt outs

4. Financial institution opt outs

5. CAN SPAM

6. Credit freeze

7. FERPA

8. Data broker opt outs

9. Internet portal opt outs

10. Advertising opt outs, including RapLeaf and NAI

For more information, contact the World Privacy Forum at 760-712-4281.

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Posted August 15, 2013 in News, Press, and Media

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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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.