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Feb 22 2016

(Updated) Urgent for California Parents: Detailed student SSNs, medical information to be released by a court

Update for March 3, 2016: This week a judge has ordered that the approximately 10 million records of California students held by the California Department of Education will not be turned entirely over to a group of community nonprofits in the Morgan Hill case. Instead, the judge ordered that several smaller databases will be turned over

Aug 17 2015

Student Privacy 101: Why school directory information sharing is a major student privacy issue

Most parents and students do not know that under the law as it is now, Directory Information about students can be shared with third parties without parental or student consent. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act determines what kinds of information schools can share with third parties. Although directory information may sound innocuous, it can include information about each student that is quite detailed. Directory information can include:

Jan 20 2015

Student Privacy 101: What is FERPA and why does it matter?

President Obama has announced that the White House will propose legislation for educational privacy reform. The administration needs to start with the basics and get FERPA right once and for all, because currently, FERPA is not doing the job it was intended to do. Here’s a backgrounder on this educational privacy cornerstone.

Jan 12 2015

Privacy News: Obama launches sweeping privacy plan

President Obama announced a sweeping set of proposals around privacy today as he spoke from the venue of the FTC. The World Privacy Forum is pleased with the announcement, but retain some concerns. “We are pleased to see the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights head into actual legislation at long last, but we are concerned

Dec 01 2014

Panel talk: Big data, privacy, and vulnerable populations

Pam Dixon will be speaking at the IAPP-FTC Practical Privacy Conference in Washington DC this week. The conference is from Dec. 2-3. Her panel talk will focus on privacy issues relating to identifiable large datasets and vulnerable populations. She will also be discussing the role of data brokers in compiling datasets and categorizing people, as

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.