WPF Executive Director named to OECD health privacy advisory group

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 15, 2015

San Diego — Pam Dixon, Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum, has been named to an OECD Advisory Group that will help guide the development of the draft OECD Council recommendations on privacy-protective approaches for the use of health data. This work will be pursued under the umbrella of the OECD Health Committee and the Committee on the Digital Economy and Policy (CDEP) respectively.

“It is a great honor to be nominated to this advisory group, and I have gladly accepted,” said Dixon. “Solving core issues around health data uses that both allows for appropriate data flows and is also privacy protective is an area of utmost importance. I am looking forward to this important work.”

The World Privacy Forum has researched and published numerous reports, analyses, formal comments, and Congressional testimony on the issue of health privacy. Core areas of work include genetics, pharmacogenomics, the Common Rule and human subject research, health privacy regulations in the US and elsewhere (including HIPAA), medical forms of identity theft and fraud, health data and privacy in developing nations, electronic health records and health data architectures and data flows, and modern data flow issues of non-regulated health data, among other related issues.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) http://www.oecd.org/about/ is an important policy-making and research body comprised of 34 member countries. Headquartered in Paris, the OECD has made many recommendations impacting privacy and technology issues. The OECD provides a global forum in which governments and other stakeholders can work together to research, develop, and promote policies with the goal of improving the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The OECD was established in 1961.

Contact:

World Privacy Forum

www.worldprivacyforum.org

Pam Dixon 760-712-4281

or info@worldprivacyforum.org

About the World Privacy Forum

The World Privacy Forum is a nonprofit, non-partisan 501(C)(3) public interest research group. The World Privacy Forum is dedicated to reimagining privacy in a digital era through groundbreaking, in-depth privacy research, analysis, and consumer education of the highest quality. Its vision is to empower people with the knowledge, rights, and tools they need to protect their privacy and shape their digital lives. The World Privacy Forum has published substantial and respected privacy studies and research, has testified before Congress and federal agencies, and is frequently quoted in major media. WPF is based in San Diego, California.

#####

Posted June 15, 2015 in Health Privacy, News, Press, and Media, OECD

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.