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We are thrilled to announce four new members of FPF’s Education Privacy Project. Led by Amelia Vance, Director of Education Privacy, the Project works to equip and connect parents, educators, state and local education agencies, ed tech companies, and other stakeholders with substantive practices, policies, and other solutions to address education privacy challenges.

We are pleased to see Facebook’s response, but are looking forward to understanding how to best address the broader issues for all stakeholders.  These issues are important to discuss – they are not going away.

CES 2018 brought to light many exciting advancements in consumer technologies. Without a doubt, Smart TVs, Smart Homes, and voice assistants were dominant: LG has a TV that rolls up like a poster; Philips introduced a Google Assistant-enabled TV is designed for the kitchen; and Samsung revealed its new line of refrigerators, TVs, and other home devices powered by Bixby, their intelligent voice assistant.

Strava’s location data controversy demonstrates the unique challenges of publicly releasing location datasets (open data), even when the data is aggregated.

On November 2-3, 2017, the Future of Privacy Forum’s Research Coordination Network partnered with Facebook, Bentley University and University of Central Florida to host a workshop titled “Bridging Industry and Academia to Tackle Responsible Research and Privacy Practices”. As the title infers, the purpose of the workshop was to bring together key stakeholders from across industry, civil society, and academia to advance the privacy research agenda, focusing on topics including data analytics and privacy-preserving technologies, privacy and ethics in user research and people-centered privacy design.

The Smart Cities and Open Data movements promise to use data to spark civic innovation and engagement, promote inclusivity, and transform modern communities. At the same time, advances in sensor technology, re-identification science, and Big Data analytics have challenged cities and their partners to construct effective safeguards for the collection, use, sharing, and disposal of personal information.

Today, the Future of Privacy Forum released a new study, Understanding Corporate Data Sharing Decisions: Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Sharing Corporate Data with Researchers. In this report, we aim to contribute to the literature by seeking the “ground truth” from the corporate sector about the challenges they encounter when they consider making data available for academic research. We hope that the impressions and insights gained from this first look at the issue will help formulate further research questions, inform the dialogue between key stakeholders, and identify constructive next steps and areas for further action and investment.

On Friday, October 27, 2017, the Future of Privacy Forum filed comments with the Federal Trade Commission in advance of the December 12, 2017 Informational Injury Workshop. The purpose of the workshop is to examine consumer injury in the context of privacy and data security. FPF’s comments focus on describing the harms that can arise from automated decision-making as well as highlighting existing risk-based privacy analyses. 

Today, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) released “Law Enforcement Access to Student Records: A Guide for School Administrators & Ed Tech Service Providers,” written by Amelia Vance and Sarah Williamson. This guide helps to answer some of the basic questions that we have heard from key stakeholders about law enforcement access to data over the past nine months.

In the coming months, FPF will be hosting or co-hosting a number of events. We welcome your attendance and participation. Please contact us at [email protected] for further information.