Inside Chile’s Department of Social Security Superintendence — the country’s social security and medical insurance agency — medical claims processors hold the livelihoods and future health of thousands of people in their hands. They are responsible for deciding whether or not the government should pay wages when workers are on medical leave or cover other expenses such as occupational mental health related costs. 

Like many government agencies these days, the agency, known by its acronym SUSESO, has begun to use machine learning models to help its limited staff process a high volume of medical claims. The idea is to streamline and in some cases automate certain parts of that claims evaluation process.

Use of AI and the tools used to govern and assess these systems have upended traditional government processes. And in Chile, SUSESO project manager Rodrigo Moya is caught in the middle. Moya heads up the Digital Transformation, Innovation and Project Unit in SUSESO’s Technology and Operations Department. He must balance project time and resource constraints with the need to analyze risks and impacts of AI. 

In this episode of Privacy on the Ground, you’ll hear the story of how Moya and others at SUSESO have used Chile's AI governance tool requiring assessment of AI systems as part of the AI procurement process, and about how Moya has navigated tensions regarding use of automation when it comes to risky government decision making affecting people’s lives. 

Featured in this episode:

• Rodrigo Moya, head of the Digital Transformation, Innovation and Project Unit in the Technology and Operations Department at SUSESO
• Mariana German, researcher in the Ethical Algorithms Project at GobLab, the public innovation laboratory at Chile’s Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez’s School of Government
• WPF’s deputy director and Privacy on the Ground host and producer Kate Kaye

This episode of Privacy on the Ground features music by Maciej Sadowski. The Privacy on the Ground intro theme features music by Pangal.

There’s no shortage of principles and policies for governing AI from governments and NGOs around the world. But how do they put those principles and policies into practice? It’s that practical side of AI governance that has been a key focus of our work at World Privacy Forum for more than two years. 

Rather than look only at government policies, in early 2023 we went layers deeper, looking at the tools that governments and NGOs around the world—from Canada to Chile to Ghana to New Zealand to Singapore—have developed for actually implementing those AI policies. 

Since then, we have observed actual use of these tools to understand how they govern and measure AI and spot where there’s room for improvement. Key to that work has been talking to people who have actually used those AI governance tools, including people in Canada and Chile. 

WPF’s forthcoming Privacy on the Ground series—AI Governance Tools on the Ground—features talks with some of those people. In this episode introducing the series, you’ll hear WPF’s founder and executive director, Pam Dixon, along with WPF’s deputy director and Privacy on the Ground host and producer Kate Kaye, discuss what led to this work and how AI Governance Tools have evolved. This episode of Privacy on the Ground features music by Maciej Sadowski. The Privacy on the Ground intro theme features music by Pangal.

Emotion recognition is baked into all sorts of software and systems many of us use or experience every day, from video call systems measuring the “mood” at a work meeting, to systems used to gauge distraction at school, or impairment or anger of drivers inside their cars. Despite its increasing proliferation, emotion recognition systems and the data use embedded in them create significant privacy impacts.  What is emotion recognition? Would fixing inaccuracy problems in these systems alleviate the potential harms they enable? Should emotion related data be recognized as a sensitive type of information along with health financial and other sensitive data? How might policymakers address potential harms of emotion recognition? Dr. Nazanin Andalibi, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, has a lot to say about all this, and she has the research to back it up.

World Privacy Forum Deputy Director Kate Kaye interviewed Dr. Andalibi in June 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This episode of Privacy on the Ground features music by Old Wave. The Privacy on the Ground intro theme features music by Pangal.

In this episode of World Privacy Forum’s Privacy on the Ground, Māori language expert and educator Te Mihinga Komene shares positive and problematic experiences working with tech companies to help build and correct Māori language translation and learning systems. Komene also discusses extractive data collection practices in AI, and why she hopes her scholarly research will help ensure the Māori language flourishes in the generative AI era. She was interviewed by World Privacy Forum Deputy Director Kate Kaye in June 2024 in Rio de Janeiro at the FAccT conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency in socio-technical systems.

There are often disconnects between data protection policy and actual practice on the ground, especially when policy established on a regional or international level is intended to meet the needs of local communities. Eric Hardy is no stranger to this reality. In his role at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center, an Indigenous library at Arizona State University, Hardy is in the thick of it, working out the everyday practical ways that Indigenous Data Sovereignty policies intersect with the priorities of the library and its tribal communities – both on campus at ASU and beyond. In this episode of Privacy on the Ground (a follow-up to our previous episode featuring Labriola National American Indian Data Center Director Alex Soto), Hardy shares his insights and approaches to incorporating Indigenous Data Sovereignty into the Labriola’s community outreach and programs, and discusses the tensions that can emerge when communities aim to establish or implement Indigenous Data Sovereignty policy that may work theoretically or on an international level, but conflict with other pressing, local community needs. Podcast photo: Labriola National American Indian Data Center Senior Program Coordinator, Eric Hardy (left) and Student Library Aid Nataani Hanley-Moraga (right).  

Turning what Alex Soto refers to as sometimes “lofty, grand” theoretical Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles and protocols into practice can be mundane, even tedious. It could require combing through hundreds of years-worth of paper documents, photos, oral histories of sensitive cultural knowledge in various formats, and other materials. It requires dedicated investments in time and money, and it requires on-the-ground communication and connection with tribal communities. In this talk recorded in April 2024 at the Labriola National American Indian Data Center, an Indigenous library on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus near Phoenix, where Soto serves as its first native director, he discussed what this day-to-day reality entails, where the gaps between policy and practice emerge, and what it might take to bring them closer together. This episode of Privacy on the Ground is part of a series from World Privacy Forum exploring Indigenous Data topics through talks with Indigenous leaders who are guiding pathways toward implementing sometimes-theoretical Indigenous data principles in real life practice. Don’t miss the treat at the end of this episode, when Soto, a hip hop MC with a longtime interest in socially-conscious music, spits a rhyme.

Every day it seems as though another little part of our lives is reflected in data. From the way we sleep to the way we order food, get a medical diagnoses, get a job -- even how our governments operate.  

These interactions, decisions, and automations generate new data, combine it with existing data, share it, analyze it, and compute it. It all means that our earlier understandings of privacy and how to protect it have lost relevance to the rapidly evolving ways we live our lives.

Discussions about privacy in relation to government policy, legal compliance, or technical implementation can be complicated, and sometimes pretty inaccessible. But the meaning of privacy and how data use affects us in our real lives is anything but. It is contextual and tangible.

In this podcast, you’ll hear talks and stories that reflect what privacy means for real people and real lives. Join World Privacy Forum deputy director and Privacy on the Ground host and producer Kate Kaye in this introductory episode to learn more about what you'll hear on the Privacy on the Ground podcast.

Dr Krystal Tsosie made what she calls a “hail mary” pass when she and colleagues pushed the genomic science research community to recognize that collection of genomic information from Indigenous peoples may not have offered much benefit to the Indigenous groups who contributed DNA -- and instead perpetuated stereotypes and other harms. Today, Dr. Tsosie is doing groundbreaking work in the field of indigenous genomic data, indigenous data sovereignty, and bioethics, not only from a scientific research and technology standpoint, but when it comes to advocating for meaningful representation and inclusion of indigenous peoples to ensure their interests are protected. Hear Dr Tsosie’s story in this eye-opening inaugural episode of Privacy on the Ground.

Amy Juan sometimes tells a story about a little bean that grows on the Tohono O’odham Nation’s San Xavier Co-op Farm called the Tepary bean. Juan is the admin manager of that farm, which is close to Tucson, Arizona. And, through her work with the International Indian Treaty Council, an indigenous peoples human rights organization, Juan has traveled the world as a knowledge holder in food and seed sovereignty for the southwest and desert region. But Juan’s story of that ancient, drought-resistant bean and the knowledge embedded inside it tells even more about what she really does and why it matters. In this episode of Privacy on the Ground, Juan tells her story of the Tepary and how it connects to food sovereignty, data sovereignty, and Indigenous communities around the world.