Privacy Act of 1974

WPF submitted comments regarding how commercially available information (CAI)  — also known as data broker data — will be handled by U.S. Executive Agencies. The Request for Information from OMB was an important opportunity to comment on a topic that has only rarely been opened for public comment. OMB Request for Information regarding Executive Branch

The World Privacy Forum has filed comments to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget in response to its Request for Feedback on Draft Guidance: Broadening Public Participation and Community Engagement with the Federal Government. WPF made three specific suggestions to OMB regarding how Privacy Act notices might be managed in a way that facilitates better feedback from those interested specifically in Privacy Act of 1974 notices, which have meaningful bearing on matters relating to data governance, privacy, and data protection.

The World Privacy Forum has filed detailed comments to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in response to its Request for Information on Privacy Impact Assessments. Specifically, OMB requested information about how the U.S. Federal government should update or adjust its requirements for Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) in regards to changes to data ecosystems brought about by Artificial Intelligence (AI). WPF provided substantive recommendations regarding administrative provisions of the Privacy Act, scalable automated AI governance tools for privacy and trustworthy AI, ensuring nimble processes for privacy and AI assessments, and ensuring balanced, skillful socio-legal-technical decisionmaking.

September 2022 By Robert Gellman and Pam Dixon Download this Report Executive Summary This report suggests specific procedural and substantive ways that the Executive Branch can revise implementation of the Privacy Act of 1974 to restrict and more carefully administer some disclosures of reproductive health information by federal agencies to federal, state, and local law

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.