Africa’s Rising Leadership in Privacy: breaking new ground before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Earlier this year, for its 2020 Almanac, ID4Africa asked WPF to write a perspective on data protection in Africa and COVID-19 impacts. The article is now published on ID4Africa’s Hub.

Why Africa, and why now? African countries have been steadily enacting data protection laws that bring their respective privacy and data protection requirements up to date with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is widely considered to be the baseline privacy standard of today. But that is not the only headline of what has been happening on the continent of Africa. Many African countries, having passed new privacy laws during and after the GDPR was negotiated, have broken new ground by advancing privacy thought in new and important ways which stretch past the boundaries of the GDPR and contextualize privacy for African contexts. The COVID-19 crisis represents a major test of the new data governance and protection systems.

Article in English: Africa’s Rising Leadership in Privacy

Article en Français: Le leadership croissant de l’Afrique en matière de vie privée

Les pays africains promulguent constamment des lois portant sur la protection des données, qui mettent leurs exigences en matière de vie privée et de protection des données à jour du Règlement Général sur la Protection des Données (RGPD) qui est largement considéré comme la norme de confidentialité de base aujourd’hui. Cependant, cela ne constitue pas la une de ce qui se passe sur le continent africain. Beaucoup de pays africains, qui ont voté des nouvelles lois relatives à la confidentialité après la négociation du Règlement Général sur la Protection des Données (RGPD), ont fait de nouveaux progrès en la matière en termes d’innovation et d’importance, franchissant les frontières du RGPD et contextualisant la vie privée dans les contextes Africains.

Related Work

RADPA: Proceedings of the first Roundtable of African Data Protection Authorities: Status and response to privacy risks in Identity Systems (English) (Pam Dixon, rapporteur, ID4Africa event, June 2019.)
RADPA: Proceedings in French
From ID4Africa: See Mauritius DPA and Morocco DPA discuss privacy and identity during COVID-19. Id4Africa livecast (recorded): Spotlight on Unique Digital Identity Numbers / Pleins feux sur les numèros d’identité uniques

Posted August 5, 2020 in Africa, COVID-19, Developing economies and privacy, Digitial Identity, Do No Harm, GDPR

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.

Africa’s Rising Leadership in Privacy: breaking new ground before and during the COVID-19 crisis

Related Work

RADPA: Proceedings of the first Roundtable of African Data Protection Authorities: Status and response to privacy risks in Identity Systems (English) (Pam Dixon, rapporteur, ID4Africa event, June 2019.)

RADPA: Proceedings in French

From ID4Africa: See Mauritius DPA and Morocco DPA discuss privacy and identity during COVID-19. Id4Africa livecast (recorded): Spotlight on Unique Digital Identity Numbers / Pleins feux sur les numèros d’identité uniques