WPF filed comments today with the Department of Health and Human Services regarding an important Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that, if adopted, will bring substantial changes to patients' electronic health records and how they are managed, among other issues. In general, we found much to support in the NPRM. However, ...
The World Privacy Forum participated in the C20 Civil Society Consultation on Sustainable Health Security Preparedness 20 April, 2021, part of the preparatory work for the G20 health-related declaration. (Rome Declaration.) In our attached statement to the C20 / G20, we outline three key requirements to allow safe and sustainable health data ecosystem knowledge utilization, including privacy and effective data governance, interoperability, and robust inclusion of LMICs and vulnerable or marginalized populations in standards development.
Recently, ID4Africa held an extremely compelling and meticulously researched livecast on the issue of gender and identity systems, with good discussions that also touched on privacy in this context. The livecast boasted an excellent roster of experts, all of whom are active work in the field. Each presented well-substantiated, groundtruthed research and insight about the myriad ways that how identity systems mediate gender matter a great deal. The cumulative effect was eye-opening.
There are many transparency documents that have been published relating to the US Intelligence Community. There are new updates to several key documents, which we have listed and linked below. While admittedly dense reading, these are key privacy-related documents relevant to US Government operations and activities and taken together, are ...
The World Privacy Forum has submitted comments to the FTC regarding its proposed consent order In the Matter of Flo Health, Inc. requesting that the FTC conduct further analysis regarding the FTC Health Data Breach Rule and its potential applicability to the alleged unconsented sharing of women's pregnancy, menstruation, mental ...
The European Commission has proposed the creation of a new European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, HERA. WPF provided comments regarding the proposal, urging the Commission to ensure from the outset that HERA will fulfill its mission with a focus on data interoperability and will include specific data governance ...
The World Privacy Forum submitted comments to the US Federal Trade Commission regarding its proposed consent order regarding In the Matter of Everalbum, Inc . The FTC alleges that Everalbum misrepresented to its users the circumstances in which the company would utilize face recognition on its users’ photos. The Commission’s ...
Global debates about data governance standards have primarily reflected the priorities and needs of rich countries, with less wealthy countries left in the role of “standards takers.” More needs to be done to ensure that digital governance policies pursued by the world’s largest economies do not create unintended consequences that make it harder for other countries to support a strong domestic digital economy and participate in the global digital economy. This is a joint blog post by Michael Pisa, Center for Global Development, WPF's Pam Dixon, and Benno Ndulu, Oxford Professor.
Archived Privacy Policy, May 2018-Jan. 2021. This privacy policy was updated May 2018 and is effective May 25, 2018. Earlier versions of our policy are linked at the bottom of the page. This privacy policy applies to the World Privacy Forum web site, www.worldprivacyforum.org, and to other privacy activities of ...
This privacy policy was updated January 2021 and is effective January 25, 2021. Earlier versions of our policy are linked at the bottom of the page. This privacy policy applies to the World Privacy Forum web site, www.worldprivacyforum.org, and to other privacy activities of the World Privacy Forum. Personal information ...
The FTC has proposed a crucially important settlement with a photo app developer, Everalbum Inc., which the FTC says “deceived consumers about its use of facial recognition technology and its retention of the photos and videos of users who deactivated their accounts.” The proposed FTC settlement will require the company ...
WPF provided feedback on the European Data Protection Board's Recommendations 01/2020 on measures that supplement transfer tools to ensure compliance with the EU level of protection of personal data. In responding to the Recommendations, we found several areas which, if improved, would enhance the stated goals of the EDPB for ...
New Zealand has meaningfully updated its privacy law, The Privacy Act 2020, which took force December 1. The new Privacy Act 2020 is a significant advancement of New Zealand’s privacy law, and encompasses numerous changes, including: Data Breach Reporting Obligations : There are new reporting obligations for data breaches. Companies ...
The World Privacy Forum is pleased to announce its work on a new project with the Center for Global Development (CGD). This project, Governing Data for Development, is led by CGD, with WPF's Executive Director Pam Dixon as co-chair of the project working group with co-chair and Oxford professor Benno Ndulu, who is also the former Governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania. The project, which has been underway for a year, has produced its first report, which is a scoping report based on interviews with key stakeholders. This blog post, which provides background on the project and links to the first project report, is being jointly posted at WPF and CGD.
This summer, the World Privacy Forum served as a member of the World Health Organization’s External Expert Group on Data Principles . We are pleased to announce that WHO has now published its updated data principles and data sharing policy, as of October 2020. While there are additional items that ...
Executive Director Pam Dixon to present a featured lecture at National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine at its Colloquium: The Future of Data Science Pam Dixon’s lecture will be Wednesday October 28 from 12:00-12:45 am Eastern. Looking Ten Years Ahead: Key Converging Technologies in Computing, Data, and Analysis and ...
The World Privacy Forum filed comments with DHS regarding its proposed new rules regarding biometric collection, and asked DHS to reconsider the rule and to apply the science, ethics, and international conventions regarding the protection of victims of human trafficking to the rule prior to moving forward. WPF found that ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to the nation's K-12 education system. These challenges certainly include the impacts of school closures, and the range of multi-layered, complex questions of whether to reopen school buildings and how to operate them safely if they do reopen. The pandemic has also highlighted ...
The COVID-19 pandemic strained the U.S. health ecosystem in numerous ways, including putting pressure on the HIPAA privacy and security rules. The Department of Health and Human Services adjusted the privacy and security rules for the pandemic through the use of statutory and administrative HIPAA waivers. While some of the adjustments are appropriate for the emergency circumstances, there are also some meaningful and potentially unwelcome privacy and security consequences. At an appropriate time, the use of HIPAA waivers as a response to health care emergencies needs a thorough review. This report sets out the facts, identifies the issues, and proposes a roadmap for change.
WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will be presenting at an OECD and Global Privacy Assembly workshop on the risks, challenges, and potential solutions regarding the intersection of COVID-19 and the uses of identity in a global public health crisis. Event details: COVID-19 and privacy virtual Workshop on “The road to ...
Today we are publishing the first of a series of discussion papers regarding face recognition and biometrics. The ideas in this paper will be discussed in the ID4Africa live cast, Spotlight on Face Recognition. Too often, discussions about what to do about the risks of face recognition have lacked the ...
Numerous African countries, having passed new privacy laws during and after the time the GDPR was being negotiated, have broken new ground by advancing privacy thought in new and important ways which stretch past the boundaries of the GDPR and contextualize privacy for African contexts. The COVID-19 crisis represents a major test of some of the new data governance systems.
NIST has published its first report regarding face recognition algorithms and the wearing of face masks. The report quantifies how one-to-one face recognition systems perform when they are utilized on images of diverse people wearing a variety of mask types and colors. The study found that pre-COVID-19 FR algorithms have substantial error rates, some reaching as high as 50 percent for false non-match rates.
The Department of Health and Human services has announced major changes for hospitals' COVID-19 data reporting processes. HHS has also made changes to the types of data that hospitals must report, expanding the data collection. This includes new information requests for disaggregated information about adult and pediatric patients, to name a few of the changes. The reporting requirements do contain patient flows, but there are still unknown aspects to the new COVID-19 reporting requirements regarding individual-level data and certain privacy considerations.
Download the PDF: Stolen Unemployment Benefits: How to detect and resolve this form of identity theft Download the PDF of state resources: State Unemployment Insurance Fraud Resources and Links Fraudsters are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to file false unemployment claims using stolen identity information. It is a particularly ...
