Digital Health Ecosystems

Jul 01 2021

WPF urges FTC Chair and Commissioners to update FTC Health Breach Notification Rule

The FTC held an historic open FTC Commission meeting, during which the Chair and Commissioners conducted their business openly and also provided an opportunity for public comments. The World Privacy Forum was selected to provide a public comment, which focused on the need to update the Health Breach Notification Rule.

Apr 20 2021

WPF Statement to the Civil Society Consultation on Sustainable Health Security Preparedness and Response, C20, 2021

The World Privacy Forum participated in the C20 Civil Society Consultation on Sustainable Health Security Preparedness 20 April, 2021, part of the preparatory work for the G20 health-related declaration. (Rome Declaration.) In our attached statement to the C20 / G20, we outline three key requirements to allow safe and sustainable health data ecosystem knowledge utilization, including privacy and effective data governance, interoperability, and robust inclusion of LMICs and vulnerable or
marginalized populations in standards development.

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.