COVID-19

K-12 schools during the pandemic: New National Academies of Science publication discusses unprecedented challenges

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to the nation’s K-12 education system. These challenges certainly include the impacts of school closures, and the range of multi-layered, complex questions of whether to reopen school buildings and how to operate them safely if they do reopen. The pandemic has also highlighted significant fault lines in the

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

Numerous African countries, having passed new privacy laws during and after the time the GDPR was being 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 some of the new data governance systems.

Face Recognition and Face Masks:  Accuracy of face recognition plummets when applied to mask-wearers; NIST report 

NIST has published its first report regarding face recognition algorithms and the wearing of face masks. The report quantifies how one-to-one face recognition systems perform when they are utilized on images of diverse people wearing a variety of mask types and colors. The study found that pre-COVID-19 FR algorithms have substantial error rates, some reaching as high as 50 percent for false non-match rates.

HHS makes significant changes to COVID-19 reporting process

The Department of Health and Human services has announced major changes for hospitals’ COVID-19 data reporting processes. HHS has also made changes to the types of data that hospitals must report, expanding the data collection. This includes new information requests for disaggregated information about adult and pediatric patients, to name a few of the changes. The reporting requirements do contain patient flows, but there are still unknown aspects to the new COVID-19 reporting requirements regarding individual-level data and certain privacy considerations.

Stolen Unemployment Benefits: How to detect and resolve this form of identity theft

Download the PDF: Stolen Unemployment Benefits: How to detect and resolve this form of identity theft Download the PDF of state resources: State Unemployment Insurance Fraud Resources and Links Fraudsters are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to file false unemployment claims using stolen identity information. It is a particularly cruel fraud that, when successful,