IAPP Summit: WPF on “When Global Emergencies Threaten to Jeopardize Privacy Rights”

WPF’s Pam Dixon participated in a wide-ranging and vibrant conversation on the intersection between public health and privacy for the IAPP Summit Series, May 20, 2020. The session is now available on demand.

When Global Emergencies Threaten to Jeopardize Privacy Rights

Release Date: 5/20/2020 (On demand at: https://iapp.org/conference/virtual-sessions/summit-sessions/#!#summit-sessions)

Moderator: Fred Cate, VP Research, Indiana University

Stanley Crosley, CIPP/US, CIPM, Co-Director, CLEAR

Michelle Dennedy, CEO, Drumware

Pam Dixon, Founder, Executive Director, World Privacy Forum

Emergency orders from executive branches of government. Enforcement discretion notices from agencies such as U.S. Health and Human Services. Requests for California’s attorney general to delay CCPA enforcement. This is the current world we move in. Perhaps more significantly, governments in Singapore and South Korea are implementing aggressive surveillance of citizens to combat the spread of COVID-19. In times such as these, where days could mean a doubling of infected individuals, should we yield on privacy rights and enforcement of violations? Does enabling government surveillance raise or lower the value of privacy in the long run? This expert panel will consider these and other relevant questions.

What you will learn:

• The state of current government enforcement efforts and waivers.

• The impact of enforcement and waivers on data protection and privacy.

• What privacy professionals can expect over the next 6-12 months.

Posted May 20, 2020 in

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.
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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.