To see the research and use this data visualization : Each jurisdiction or country in the world has an associated country card with extensive data governance information and links. The power of this data visualization is to filter and sort the country cards to reveal patterns and regional details. Filter ...
Deputy Director Kate Kaye is in Rio de Janeiro Brazil from 3-6 June to attend the leading conference on Artificial Intelligence and trustworthy AI in socio-technical systems, ACM's Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT). While at the conference, Kaye will be interviewing paper authors and leading AI experts for forthcoming WPF podcasts, and to inform additional work.
WPF filed comments with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology regarding its draft governance plan regarding synthetic content. WPF's comments focused on 7 recommendationsWPF's comments focused on 7 recommendations ranging from technical to policy issues. One overarching recommendation was that NIST ensure that human rights were attended to in all of its plans. Additional recommendations include requesting that NIST attend to the risks of digital exhaust in metadata, ensure that biometric data is included in the guidance, among other recommendations.
ID4Africa celebrates its 10th Annual General Meeting this year in Cape Town, South Africa with a program that pushes against multiple boundaries and achieves a new breadth and greater inclusion of diverse stakeholders. ID4Africa’s AGM is easily the most significant identity conference in the world at this point. There are multiple reasons for this; an important one is that the knowledge content at ID4Africa is not replicated anywhere else. In the past, this knowledge base has been focused primarily around government stakeholders. This year, this roster will now carefully expand to civil society organizations that have been deeply involved with African ID systems to gather additional perspectives and foster cooperative dialogue.
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce that it has joined more than 200 of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) stakeholders to participate in a Department of Commerce initiative to support the development and deployment of trustworthy and safe AI. Established by the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in February 2024, the U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) brings together AI creators and users, academics, government and industry researchers, and civil society organizations to meet this mission.
WPF is pleased to announce that Executive Director Pam Dixon's paper on the topic of collective privacy was selected for inclusion at the Privacy Law Scholars Conference from a large and highly competitive field. The paper is now available at the PLSC website as a confidential download for conference attendees. ...
The World Privacy Forum filed detailed comments regarding draft guidance on privacy and medical research to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The proposed guidance, Facilitating Understanding in Informed Consent, is related to consent for human subject research (medical research) and is particularly important. Currently, models of consent are in the process of going digital, which has created a number of challenging problems to solve. In the comments, WPF had several recommendations to improve consent and privacy.
5 April 2024, Paris, France — World Privacy Forum Executive Director Pam Dixon has been invited to speak at the State House of Mongolia for the Government of Mongolia’s National Consultation on e-Health. She will be speaking twice at this event; first, on the topic of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and second, on Big Data in e-Health. She will be presenting later in the week on AI governance and Privacy before the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications, and on the topic of AI Governance Tools before the National Human Rights Commission of Mongolia. All speeches will take place in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
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.
Today the Biden-Harris Administration published a Memorandum that sets forth how U.S. Federal Agencies and Executive Departments will govern their use of Artificial Intelligence. The OMB memorandum provides an extensive and in some ways surprising articulation of emergent guardrails around modern AI. There are many points of interest to discuss, but the most striking includes the thread of biometrics systems guidance throughout the memorandum and continuing on in the White House Fact Sheet and associated materials. Additionally, the articulation of minimum practices for safety -impacting and rights- impacting AI will likely become important touch points in regulatory discussions in the U.S. and elsewhere. The guidance represents a significant policy shift for the U.S. Federal government, particularly around biometrics.
In December 2023, WPF submitted detailed comments to the U.S. Office of Management and Budget regarding its Request for Comments on Advancing Governance, Innovation, and Risk Management for Agency Use of Artificial Intelligence Memorandum. OMB published the request in the Federal Register on November 3, 2023. This particular Memorandum is of historic importance, as it articulates the establishment of new agency requirements in the areas of AI governance, innovation, and risk management, and would direct agencies to adopt specific minimum risk management practices for uses of AI that impact the rights and safety of the public.
WPF's Pam Dixon will be in Kigali, Rwanda to be the lead instructor on a course on digital identity ecosystems as a lecturer for Carnegie Mellon University, as part of their CEE-TP Courses for IT and policy in the developing world . This course, Identity Ecosystems and Digital Transformation: the ...
WPF submitted comments to the National Institute of Standards and Technology regarding its Draft Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees . The comments approach the NIST Draft Guidance from a policy perspective, and urged changes to some parts of the definitional language in the Draft Guidance. Key areas of the ...
WPF submitted comments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regarding its notice of proposed rulemaking regarding Personal Financial Data Rights. This was a particularly important NPRM because it touches on multiple aspects of financial data in our modern era, which means that it touches privacy, identity, poverty, and digital rights ...
This statement was delivered orally to the FTC in its Open Commission Meeting, held on 18 January 2024.
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.
WPF has organized a robust and interactive tutorial on advanced AI governance and privacy for Computer Vision systems (and beyond), to be held at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV). WACV is the premier international computer vision event comprised of a main conference and several co-located workshops and tutorials. What makes this AI governance and data protection tutorial compelling? The 8 speakers for this tutorial are working at the top of their respective fields, with presentations that combine to make a muscular, socio-technical dive into today’s most pressing issues around AI technology, governance, privacy, and policy structures. This tutorial is arranged in a logical flow that moves participants through the technical and the policy aspects of advanced systems development and governance. including technical, legal, ethical, and privacy analysis, as well as emerging norms and additional considerations to be aware of. The tutorial will include ample time for analysis and discussion, and will be participatory.
Today Inside Higher Ed wrote an excellent article about the relationship of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the recent doxing of Harvard students. In short, it was easy to dox the students based on information the college published — legally — about them. FERPA was supposed ...
8 September 2023 The World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce the appointment of Senior Ethics and AI Fellow, Emmi Bane. Emmi has a deep foundation in the construction of consent ecosystems, and is proficient in both their technical implementation and the accompanying policy analysis and considerations. At WPF, her ...
WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will be presenting an overview and discussion of the state of the US digital identity ecosystem at the Federal Identity Forum this week, and how privacy regulations and standards operate within the evolving landscape, including a discussion of the emerging mobile ID landscape in the ...
The World Privacy Forum was honored to participate in a White House Roundtable on the topic of Data Brokers, a topic WPF has spent decades researching and working on. In its r eadout of the roundtable , the White House noted that "Participants underscored how the data broker economy enables ...
The World Privacy Forum filed comments regarding the US Federal Trade Commission’s 2023 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking regarding Health Breach Notification. This marks the second set of comments WPF has filed, our first being in 2009 regarding the first iteration of the Health Breach Rule. The comments are technical, and ...
WPF provided detailed comments to the US Department of Health and Human Services regarding its proposal for changes to HIPAA regarding modifications to the Privacy Rule. Specifically, HHS proposed modifications to standards for the privacy of individually identifiable health information. WPF supports many of the changes proposed in the NPRM.
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to provide a summary of Executive Director Pam Dixon's work in Nairobi, Kenya at the ID4Africa AGM. Dixon served as the Senior Special Rapporteur for two workshops at the 2023 ID4Africa Annual General Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya 23-25 May.In June, ID4Africa hosted a live ...
The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) has determined that Meta Ireland infringed Article 46(1) of the GDPR when it “continued to transfer personal data from the EU/EEA to the USA following the delivery of the CJEU’s judgment in Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland Limited and Maximillian Schrems.” The DPC has given Meta Ireland 6 months to find a solution. This is just enough time to create the possibility of a road forward; a possibility which is contained primarily in the effective implementation of proposed European - U.S. Data Privacy Framework on the part of the U.S. and the EU.
