DOGE’s Growing Reach into Personal Data: What it Means for Human Rights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Deborah Brown: “Expansive interagency sharing of personal data could fuel abuses against vulnerable people and communities who are already being targeted by Trump administration policies, like immigrants, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, and student protesters. The personal data held by the government reveals deeply sensitive information, such as people’s immigration status, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and economic status.

A massive centralized government database could easily be used for a range of abusive purposes, like to discriminate against current federal employees and future job applicants on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, or to facilitate the deportation of immigrants. It could result in people forgoing public services out of fear that their data will be weaponized against them by another federal agency.

But the danger doesn’t stop with those already in the administration’s crosshairs. The removal of barriers keeping private data siloed could allow the government or DOGE to deny federal loans for education or Medicaid benefits based on unrelated or even inaccurate data. It could also facilitate the creation of profiles containing all of the information various agencies hold on every person in the country. Such profiles, combined with social media activity, could facilitate the identification and targeting of people for political reasons, including in the context of elections.

Information silos exist for a reason. Personal data should be collected for a determined, specific, and legitimate purpose, and not used for another purpose without notice or justification, according to the key internationally recognized data protection principle, “purpose limitation.” Sharing data seamlessly across federal or even state agencies in the name of an undefined and unmeasurable goal of efficiency is incompatible with this core data protection principle…(More)”.

Trump Wants to Merge Government Data. Here Are 314 Things It Might Know About You.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Emily Badger and Sheera Frenkel: “The federal government knows your mother’s maiden name and your bank account number. The student debt you hold. Your disability status. The company that employs you and the wages you earn there. And that’s just a start. It may also know your …and at least 263 more categories of data.These intimate details about the personal lives of people who live in the United States are held in disconnected data systems across the federal government — some at the Treasury, some at the Social Security Administration and some at the Department of Education, among other agencies.

The Trump administration is now trying to connect the dots of that disparate information. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the “consolidation” of these segregated records, raising the prospect of creating a kind of data trove about Americans that the government has never had before, and that members of the president’s own party have historically opposed.

The effort is being driven by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his lieutenants with the Department of Government Efficiency, who have sought access to dozens of databases as they have swept through agencies across the federal government. Along the way, they have elbowed past the objections of career staff, data security protocols, national security experts and legal privacy protections…(More)”.

Privacy-Enhancing and Privacy-Preserving Technologies in AI: Enabling Data Use and Operationalizing Privacy by Design and Default

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton (“CIPL”): “provides an in-depth exploration of how privacy-enhancing technologies (“PETs”) are being deployed to address privacy within artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems. It aims to describe how these technologies can help operationalize privacy by design and default and serve as key business enablers, allowing companies and public sector organizations to access, share and use data that would otherwise be unavailable. It also seeks to demonstrate how PETs can address challenges and provide new opportunities across the AI life cycle, from data sourcing to model deployment, and includes real-world case studies…

As further detailed in the Paper, CIPL’s recommendations for boosting the adoption of PETs for AI are as follows:

Stakeholders should adopt a holistic view of the benefits of PETs in AI. PETs deliver value beyond addressing privacy and security concerns, such as fostering trust and enabling data sharing. It is crucial that stakeholders consider all these advantages when making decisions about their use.

Regulators should issue more clear and practical guidance to reduce regulatory uncertainty in the use of PETs in AI. While regulators increasingly recognize the value of PETs, clearer and more practical guidance is needed to help organizations implement these technologies effectively.

Regulators should adopt a risk-based approach to assess how PETs can meet standards for data anonymization, providing clear guidance to eliminate uncertainty. There is uncertainty around whether various PETs meet legal standards for data anonymization. A risk-based approach to defining anonymization standards could encourage wider adoption of PETs.

Deployers should take steps to provide contextually appropriate transparency to customers and data subjects. Given the complexity of PETs, deployers should ensure customers and data subjects understand how PETs function within AI models…(More)”.

Europe’s GDPR privacy law is headed for red tape bonfire within ‘weeks’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ellen O’Regan: “Europe’s most famous technology law, the GDPR, is next on the hit list as the European Union pushes ahead with its regulatory killing spree to slash laws it reckons are weighing down its businesses.

The European Commission plans to present a proposal to cut back the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR for short, in the next couple of weeks. Slashing regulation is a key focus for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, as part of an attempt to make businesses in Europe more competitive with rivals in the United States, China and elsewhere. 

The EU’s executive arm has already unveiled packages to simplify rules around sustainability reporting and accessing EU investment. The aim is for companies to waste less time and money on complying with complex legal and regulatory requirements imposed by EU laws…Seven years later, Brussels is taking out the scissors to give its (in)famous privacy law a trim.

There are “a lot of good things about GDPR, [and] privacy is completely necessary. But we don’t need to regulate in a stupid way. We need to make it easy for businesses and for companies to comply,” Danish Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen told reporters last week. Denmark will chair the work in the EU Council in the second half of 2025 as part of its rotating presidency.

The criticism of the GDPR echoes the views of former Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who released a landmark economic report last September warning that Europe’s complex laws were preventing its economy from catching up with the United States and China. “The EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation,” Draghi wrote, singling out the Artificial Intelligence Act and the GDPR…(More)”.

Differential Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open access book by  Simson L. Garfinkel: “Differential privacy (DP) is an increasingly popular, though controversial, approach to protecting personal data. DP protects confidential data by introducing carefully calibrated random numbers, called statistical noise, when the data is used. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have all integrated the technology into their software, and the US Census Bureau used DP to protect data collected in the 2020 census. In this book, Simson Garfinkel presents the underlying ideas of DP, and helps explain why DP is needed in today’s information-rich environment, why it was used as the privacy protection mechanism for the 2020 census, and why it is so controversial in some communities.

When DP is used to protect confidential data, like an advertising profile based on the web pages you have viewed with a web browser, the noise makes it impossible for someone to take that profile and reverse engineer, with absolute certainty, the underlying confidential data on which the profile was computed. The book also chronicles the history of DP and describes the key participants and its limitations. Along the way, it also presents a short history of the US Census and other approaches for data protection such as de-identification and k-anonymity…(More)”.

Conflicts over access to Americans’ personal data emerging across federal government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Caitlin Andrews: “The Trump administration’s fast-moving efforts to limit the size of the U.S. federal bureaucracy, primarily through the recently minted Department of Government Efficiency, are raising privacy and data security concerns among current and former officials across the government, particularly as the administration scales back positions charged with privacy oversight. Efforts to limit the independence of a host of federal agencies through a new executive order — including the independence of the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission — are also ringing alarm bells among civil society and some legal experts.

According to CNN, several staff within the Office of Personnel Management’s privacy and records keeping department were fired last week. Staff who handle communications and respond to Freedom of Information Act requests were also let go. Though the entire privacy team was not fired, according to the OPM, details about what kind of oversight will remain within the department were limited. The report also states the staff’s termination date is 15 April.

It is one of several moves the Trump administration has made in recent days reshaping how entities access and provide oversight to government agencies’ information.

The New York Times reports on a wide range of incidents within the government where DOGE’s efforts to limit fraudulent government spending by accessing sensitive agency databases have run up against staffers who are concerned about the privacy of Americans’ personal information. In one incident, Social Security Administration acting Commissioner Michelle King was fired after resisting a request from DOGE to access the agency’s database. “The episode at the Social Security Administration … has played out repeatedly across the federal government,” the Times reported…(More)”.

On Privacy and Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Daniel J. Solove: “With the rapid rise of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence, is privacy dead? Can anything be done to save us from a dystopian world without privacy?

In this short and accessible book, internationally renowned privacy expert Daniel J. Solove draws from a range of fields, from law to philosophy to the humanities, to illustrate the profound changes technology is wreaking upon our privacy, why they matter, and what can be done about them. Solove provides incisive examinations of key concepts in the digital sphere, including control, manipulation, harm, automation, reputation, consent, prediction, inference, and many others.

Compelling and passionate, On Privacy and Technology teems with powerful insights that will transform the way you think about privacy and technology…(More)”.

Empowering open data sharing for social good: a privacy-aware approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tânia Carvalho et al: “The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the world at multiple levels. Data sharing was pivotal for advancing research to understand the underlying causes and implement effective containment strategies. In response, many countries have facilitated access to daily cases to support research initiatives, fostering collaboration between organisations and making such data available to the public through open data platforms. Despite the several advantages of data sharing, one of the major concerns before releasing health data is its impact on individuals’ privacy. Such a sharing process should adhere to state-of-the-art methods in Data Protection by Design and by Default. In this paper, we use a Covid-19 data set from Portugal’s second-largest hospital to show how it is feasible to ensure data privacy while improving the quality and maintaining the utility of the data. Our goal is to demonstrate how knowledge exchange in multidisciplinary teams of healthcare practitioners, data privacy, and data science experts is crucial to co-developing strategies that ensure high utility in de-identified data…(More).”

Big brother: the effects of surveillance on fundamental aspects of social vision

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kiley Seymour et al: “Despite the dramatic rise of surveillance in our societies, only limited research has examined its effects on humans. While most research has focused on voluntary behaviour, no study has examined the effects of surveillance on more fundamental and automatic aspects of human perceptual awareness and cognition. Here, we show that being watched on CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception—the ability to consciously detect faces. Using the method of continuous flash suppression (CFS), we show that when people are surveilled (N = 24), they are quicker than controls (N = 30) to detect faces. An independent control experiment (N = 42) ruled out an explanation based on demand characteristics and social desirability biases. These findings show that being watched impacts not only consciously controlled behaviours but also unconscious, involuntary visual processing. Our results have implications concerning the impacts of surveillance on basic human cognition as well as public mental health…(More)”.

Protecting civilians in a data-driven and digitalized battlespace: Towards a minimum basic technology infrastructure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ann Fitz-Gerald and Jenn Hennebry: “This article examines the realities of modern day warfare, including a rising trend in hybrid threats and irregular warfare which employ emerging technologies supported by digital and data-driven processes. The way in which these technologies become applied generates a widened battlefield and leads to a greater number of civilians being caught up in conflict. Humanitarian groups mandated to protect civilians have adapted their approaches to the use of new emerging technologies. However, the lack of international consensus on the use of data, the public and private nature of the actors involved in conflict, the transnational aspects of the widened battlefield, and the heightened security risks in the conflict space pose enormous challenges for the protection of civilians agenda. Based on the dual-usage aspect of emerging technologies, the challenges associated with regulation and the need for those affected by conflict to demonstrate resilience towards, and knowledge of, digital media literacy, this paper proposes the development of guidance for a “minimum basic technology infrastructure” which is supported by technology, regulation, and public awareness and education…(More)”.