Introducing WPF’s Privacy on the Ground Podcast
Pam Dixon, Executive Director
10 September 2024
It is my great pleasure to introduce our new podcast, Privacy on the Ground. This podcast is about all of the things World Privacy Forum has been researching, writing about and working on for more than 20 years, but in a format for today’s audiences. Our groundbreaking work on data governance, data protection, privacy, and complex technologies and ecosystems is often concentrated in dense reports that can take years to research and produce. Our reports have consistently made meaningful and quantifiable differences in the world. But not everyone will have the time to read a 100+ page report.
So, now, as we come across compelling people, stories, places, news, and ideas in the course of our work, in addition to our deeply researched datasets and reports, we will be bringing intriguing people and ideas and information to the public faster, and in shorter formats. Our short article series, AI Governance on the Ground, which we launched this year, is a series of short articles about AI implementation in reality, not theory. Look for many more articles in this series from us over the next year.
Our Privacy on the Ground podcast is cut from the same cloth of a shorter more modern format, except our lens for the podcast is privacy writ large, inclusive of many ideas regarding governance, data, ethics, and more. We seek to illuminate through compelling interviews and dialogue how privacy and data governance are being implemented in different contexts and sectors and geographies. And along the way, we seek to continue to ask the questions that will inform our work documenting how data governance and privacy are undergoing a radical transformation in our increasingly digitalized era suffused with a range of consequential ecosystems, from identity ecosystems to public health ecosystems to AI ecosystems and more.
For our first podcast series for the launch, we feature people and stories stemming from recent research we have been conducting regarding different forms of privacy governance, particularly collective forms of privacy. This summer I workshopped a paper at the Privacy Law Scholars conference on the topic of collective privacy. It was a well-attended and helpful session, and the paper is now in the process of being published. This research found that while the conception of privacy as an individual right is currently ascendant in terms of legislation today, conceptions of privacy as a group or community-based privacy rights have existed for many years, and these ideas are re-emerging in some contexts in fresh new ways. These ideas regarding collective privacy can be found in policy discussion around AI, and can also be found, for example, in various indigenous approaches to privacy and data sovereignty as well as in certain types of historic legal contexts, like Rwanda’s Gacaca courts.
These ideas can also be found in our first series in the podcast hosted and produced by WPF Deputy Director Kate Kaye. In the podcast launch series, she explores a community and collective view of privacy via interviews with Indigenous people who are leading the way in practicing Indigenous Data Sovereignty on the ground, in genetics and bioethics, farming and seed reclamation, librarianship, and language data collection. For the first time, it is possible to peek into the contours of our work in new and emerging areas of privacy as we conduct the work. You’ll be able to hear and experience the most interesting conversations that could otherwise take months or years to make it into a finished report. Our first series is already available on Apple, Spotify, and iHeart podcasts, with more episodes in this series to come.
We hope you’ll find and subscribe to WPF’s Privacy on the Ground podcast in Apple, Spotify, or iHeart podcasts, or by searching for Privacy on the Ground in other podcast platforms.
Pam Dixon
Founder and Executive Director, World Privacy Forum