FTC announces expanded settlement with Uber, WPF comments included

The FTC finalized an expanded settlement with Uber, Inc. regarding the company’s data security practices. According to the FTC complaint, in the midst of the Commission’s original investigation, Uber experienced a second serious breach and waited more than a year after learning of the breach before informing the public or the Commission. The World Privacy Forum submitted two sets of comments to the FTC regarding the Uber breach, urging the Commission to adopt a privacy program with rigorous audits set to clear benchmarks, and to make the results of the audits available publicly in a proactive manner.

The expanded settlement has now outlined specifics of certain elements to be included in a privacy program, which greatly assist with creating audits and benchmarking future data security and data protection activities. WPF had also requested that audits be made public. The settlement allows for the audits to be made public by Freedom of Information Act requests.

FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra responded directly to World Privacy Forum’s comments saying in a statement:

“In particular, I agree with World Privacy Forum and EPIC that the Commission should make required audits and assessments public, subject to appropriate redactions. The FTC has responded to this comment by stating that these documents are available by filing a Freedom of Information Act request, but proactive disclosure would be superior, given the public interest in keeping this company in compliance.”

WPF is pleased with the improvements in the requirements for the privacy program, and is pleased to see that Commissioner Chopra supports moving toward more proactive disclosure of data practices.

Posted October 26, 2018 in Consumer Privacy, Data Breach, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Public Comments

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

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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.