Random Privacy Updates #1
Watch this IAPP keynote where Apple and Google privacy officers discuss the contact tracing app. Several months after the COVID-19 pandemic and there are still a lot of countries grappling with ever-increasing number of infections. Understandably, we are turning to technology-based solutions to optimize contact tracing efforts. Apple and Google teamed up to create a contact-tracing approach based on Bluetooth technology. In this video, they discuss how the project came about, addressing the tension between efficacy and privacy, and how they employed the privacy-by-design approach.
Here's a link to the awesome Princeton University - KU Leuven project Longitudinal Corpus of Privacy Policies. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, they built a dataset of "1,071,488 English-language privacy policy snapshots from 130,620 distinct websites chosen from the Alexa Top 100K from 2009-2019." They wrote a paper based on their initial automated analysis of the dataset and are also making the dataset available to researchers.
The International Committee of the Red Cross will be launching the second edition of its Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action with a series of panels on issues relating to technology and data protection. The day-long event, dubbed Follow the Sun (events are hosted across different countries, in order of the sunrise--from Tokyo, Japan to Bogota, Columbia). I'm looking into two panels that I might attend: Panel 1 (Digital Identity and Biometrics) and Panel 2 (Covid-19 and Contract Tracing Applications). I am quite stoked about Panel 1 because digital identity is a particularly thorny issue that we will need to resolve soon. For one, the Philippines' distribution of humanitarian aid for populations affected by COVID-19 would have been much more efficient if people had digital identities. Of course, the fact of a repressive government that is also ill-equipped to protect personal data complicates matters. Register for the event here.