Healthcare technologies are rapidly evolving, producing new data types and innovative data uses. Data and technology can bring significant enhancements to the healthcare system, deepen patients’ and consumers’ engagement and understanding about their health, and be used as part of initiatives meant to improve health outcomes. It is critical to analyze how sensitive health and wellness data affect individual privacy and understand what it means for doctors, researchers, and companies to responsibly use such data. The FPF health team continues to build on its prior work on Consumer Wearables and Wellness Apps and Devices and Privacy Best Practices for Consumer Genetic Testing Services by exploring and addressing issues at the forefront and intersection of health, data, and privacy. Of main focus are the privacy challenges related to the collection, use, and sharing of both medical data and data that falls outside of the scope of HIPAA and FDA regulations. FPF brings together stakeholders to analyze how new technologies and data practices in the health ecosystem can impact individual privacy and promote the more effective and ethical use of data.
FPF Launches Asia-Pacific Region Office, Global Data Protection Expert Clarisse Girot Leads Team
The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) has appointed Clarisse Girot, PhD, LLM, an expert on Asian and European privacy legislation, to lead its new FPF Asia-Pacific office based in Singapore as Director. This new office expands FPF’s international reach in Asia and complements FPF’s offices in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, as well as partnerships […]
FPF and Leading Health & Equity Organizations Issue Principles for Privacy & Equity in Digital Contact Tracing Technologies
With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, FPF engaged leaders within the privacy and equity communities to develop actionable guiding principles and a framework to help bolster the responsible implementation of digital contact tracing technologies (DCTT). Today, seven privacy, civil rights, and health equity organizations signed on to these guiding principles for organizations implementing […]
Navigating Preemption through the Lens of Existing State Privacy Laws
This post is the second of two posts on federal preemption and enforcement in United States federal privacy legislation. See Preemption in US Privacy Laws (June 14, 2021). In drafting a federal baseline privacy law in the United States, lawmakers must decide to what extent the law will override state and local privacy laws. In […]
Stanford Medicine & Empatica, Google and Its Academic Partners Receive FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship
The second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship honors two teams of researchers and corporate partners for their commitment to privacy and ethical uses of data in their efforts to research aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. One team is a collaboration between Stanford Medicine researchers led by Tejaswini Mishra, PhD, Professor Michael Snyder, PhD, and […]
Google: COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports
Google has been recognized with the second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship for its work to produce, aggregate, anonymize, and share data on community movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Google’s Community Mobility Reports go through a robust anonymization process that employs differential privacy techniques to ensure that personal data, including an individual’s location, movement, […]
FPF Issues Award for Research Data Stewardship to Stanford Medicine & Empatica, Google & Its Academic Partners
WASHINGTON, DC (June 29, 2021) – The second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship honors two teams of researchers and corporate partners for their commitment to privacy and ethical uses of data in their efforts to research aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic. One team is a collaboration between Stanford Medicine researchers led by Tejaswini Mishra, PhD, Professor […]
Research from Stanford Medicine and Empatica, Inc: Early Detection of COVID-19 Using Empatica Smartwatch Data
Tejaswini Mishra, PhD, Michael Snyder, PhD, Erika Mahealani Hunting, Alessandra Celli, Arshdeep Chauhan, and Jessi Wanyi Li from the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics, and Empatica Inc. are the recipients of the second-annual FPF Award for Research Data Stewardship. The collaboration between the research team from Stanford Medicine and Empatica, a medical […]
Colorado Privacy Act Passes Legislature: Growing Inconsistencies Ramp Up Pressure for Federal Privacy Law
Today, the Colorado Senate approved the House version of the Colorado Privacy Act (SB21-190) that passed yesterday, on June 7. If approved by Governor Jared Polis, Colorado will follow Virginia and California as the third U.S. state to establish baseline legal protections for consumer privacy. “Although the Colorado Privacy Act contains notable advances that build […]
Supporting Responsible Research and Data Protection
Scientific research is often dependent on access to personal information, whether collected directly from individuals or collected for a real-world use and then accessed for research. For research to be trusted, processing of personal information must be lawful, ethical and subject to privacy and security protections. Supporting responsible research is a priority for FPF: Data […]
Statement on Passage of the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act
Statement by Future of Privacy Forum CEO Jules Polonetsky regarding the approval of the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act: “Today, Governor Ralph Northam signed the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), making Virginia the second state, following California, to establish baseline legal protections for consumer privacy – a significant milestone in the United States. The […]