Update in the California student data release case

This week a judge ordered that the approximately 10 million records of California students held by the California Department of Education will not be turned entirely over to a group of community nonprofits in the Morgan Hill case. Instead, the judge ordered that several smaller databases may be turned over to the nonprofits, but that the largest and most significant database, CALPADS, will not. The nonprofits and their representatives will instead need to access the CALPADS database in situ within the California Department of Education secure environment, and will need to run queries against the database only.

The decision to run queries against the database versus releasing the CALPADS database with its rich data sets about millions of students is a significant improvement over the judge’s initial order. While the initial order provided for a special set of release protocols, the breach risk presented by the CALPADS dataset is just too great. The CALPADS database contains an extraordinary dataset, everything from medical information to disciplinary information to economic status to ethnicity and immigration status to detailed addressing and other demographic information. In the ruling, the judge also noted the deep flaws with the aged Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that allowed for unconsented data release via court orders and in this case created a backlash from parents, the media, and privacy experts.

The judge mentioned the copious public response to the court from concerned parents, citing an abundance of petitions for the court to remove their children’s records from the data release. Those petitions, said the judge, will not be filed, but will be securely stored.

WPF is still analyzing the ruling, as well as the contents of the databases that will be turned over in full.

Related Documents:

The February 29 ruling is here: Morgan Hill order after FERPA status conference

For more background about this data release issue, see our original blog post.

Posted March 3, 2016 in Big Data, California, Databases, Education privacy

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.