India's Supreme Court has ruled in a unanimous decision that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21 of India's constitution. This is a landmark decision for India, and it was decided by a full bench of nine judges. The decision comes at a time when India's national biometric ID ...
About this Data Visualization : This interactive chart displays the chronological implementation of National IDs in countries globally, from 1850 to 2017. The raw dataset used to create the chart originates from the World Bank (See data sourcing below). This dataset covers high, middle and lower income countries. How to ...
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a rare alert to parents about "smart toys," that is, those that connect to WiFi, and may contain microphones, sensors, and other information-gathering capacities. The alert states that these kinds of toys could pose risks to childrens' privacy and safety. The alert, ...
This interactive map displays the presence of voter IDs, including biometric voter IDs, in middle and lower income countries globally. Voter IDs in this dataset were distinguished as much as possible from general identification. The raw dataset used to create the map data originates from the World Bank.
Have you ever filled out an application online for a “loan matching service”? If so, you have to hope that you didn’t fill out an application on one of the websites operated by a company called Blue Global. They ran websites like autoloansusa.com, loanmarketplace.com, moneytoday.com, 247loan.com, 100dayloans.com, and others. Court documents released this week by the US Federal Trade Commission reveal that after the company collected consumers' financial information, it sold most of that information to non-lenders, including SSNs, bank account numbers, and ...
In recent days, there has been an uptick in discussion regarding the potential fate of the EU-US Privacy Shield. Some of the discussion has been spurred by Cam Kerry's recent analysis of several critical weaknesses of the EU-US Privacy Shield, which is now under review by the European Commission. The ...
I note with sadness the passing of Joseph Alhadeff over the Memorial Day weekend. Joseph was a thoughtful and important person in the privacy world who has left behind a substantial body of work and a legacy of privacy thought of the utmost quality. Joseph was deeply knowledgeable about privacy ...
Our Top Ten Opt Outs is one of our most popular consumer guides. In it, you can see a short list of the most important privacy opt outs available to you today; we've curated the opt-outs and made things simple so you don't have to wander through a list of ...
Pam Dixon will be participating in a special Workshop at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, "Designing our Digital Society." The Workshop is open to the public, and will be held from 4pm-7 pm Tuesday, April 25, 2017. The Workshop will be held at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, ...
WPF's Pam Dixon is speaking as a stakeholder at the G20 Digital Policies for the Future Multi-stakeholder Conference taking place 6 April in Dusseldorf, Germany. The event brings together 300 G20 country stakeholders to discuss aspects of digital transformation. WPF's role will be to discuss encouraging transparency and creating confidence ...
We are honored to be speaking on two panels at this year’s RightsCon, an event that takes place 29-31 March in Brussels, Belgium. Both of our panels will be on the 31 of March. Here is some additional reading and information for each of the panels: Panel 1: Managing Concerns Around Digital Identity, Fri, 9:00-10:15, Innovation, 1st Floor....
Medical treatments tailored to each individual’s physiology and genetic history have long been a dream, but this dream is data-intensive. The most current effort to turn personalized medicine into a reality is the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI), which will collect and share biospecimens and health data from over a million volunteers for research -- this report analyzes the privacy protections for this initiative.
This analysis is an in-depth look at the January 2017 Executive Order 13768, Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, and its interaction with two laws, the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Judicial Redress Act of 2015. Regardless of the reasons underlying why the order was written, a key question this analysis considers is if the order damages the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, and what that means.
Television maker VIZIO is paying $2.2 million in penalties to settle charges after the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General's office brought a complaint against the company for violating its customers' privacy. The complaint against VIZIO stated that the company collected detailed information on millions of its customers TV viewing habits without their express consent, and that VIZIO facilitated something called "data appending," which is when even more detailed information is added to existing customer profiles.
The Global Risk Report 2017 from the World Economic Forum cites threats to global economic wellbeing ranging from natural disasters and large scale involuntary migration to -- this year -- risks arising from a "growing cyberdependency." Specific risks the report calls out in this category are cyberattacks, data fraud and ...
The Sackler Forum is jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society January 25, 2017 For Immediate Release WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon will present a lecture on privacy, ethics, machine learning, and society at the Sackler Forum Feb. 1 in Washington, DC. The Sackler forum ...
A Baltimore mom was surprised and unhappy recently when her son came home from school missing three teeth. The source? A mobile dental clinic at a Baltimore city public school had extracted some of her son’s teeth that day. The mother didn’t realize it, but she had already consented to the dental work through signing a permission slip/release form.
The World Privacy Forum commented in support of a proposed change to the federal rules of practice and procedure. The change would eliminate the requirement to include the last four digits of a litigant’s Social Security Number on Appellate Form 4, which is used by petitioners seeking to proceed in ...
On December 14 Yahoo announced a serious security breach in which sophisticated data attackers grabbed users' answers to security questions, among other information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates. This breach is particularly worrisome because it culled sensitive information from 1 billion Yahoo customers, which makes ...
At Biometrics 2016 in London, I gave a keynote presentation on the state of biometrics policy and privacy, with suggestions for further work. Several aspects of that presentation have garnered follow-up requests, including requests for more information about my discussion of the "Fishbone Model" of biometric template security, a model ...
The World Privacy Forum submitted comments today on an important proposal from the US Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget regarding a circular directing agencies how to write, post, review, and generally handle Privacy Act notices. The proposal, called Circular A-108 Federal Agency Responsibilities for Review, ...
The World Privacy Forum filed a pair of comments about a US Department of Justice proposal regarding treatment of insider threat records at the FBI. Our first comments respond to a Systems of Records notice, our second comments respond to a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on the same issue. In ...
The US Postal Service's new Informed Delivery system has the potential to impact every household in the United States that receives mail. It's important, and there are plenty of privacy issues. The World Privacy Forum wrote extensive comments to the United States Postal Service warning it about certain consumer privacy and security risks of its Informed Delivery service. Here's more information about Informed Delivery, and why it may create new phishing risks.
The World Privacy Forum filed comments today with the US Office of Management and Budget regarding a US Customs and Border Protection agency proposal to request social media account information from arriving and departing travelers on entry/exit forms. Earlier this year, WPF wrote comments to CBP directly and urged the agency to drop its proposal to request social media profile information from travelers on these key entry/exit forms due to procedural and policy concerns.
This interactive map displays the location of each medical data breach recorded at the US Department of Health and Human Services from 2009-2016. To get the most from the map, you can view breaches by year, by region, and in a text list.
