Data Privacy Policy – ACM and SIGAI Emerging Issue
An issue recently raised involves the data privacy of SIGAI and ACM members using EasyChair to submit articles for publication, including the AI Matters Newsletter. As part of entering a new submission through EasyChair, the following message appears:
“AI Matters, 2014-present, is an ACM conference. The age and gender fields are added by ACM. By providing the information requested, you will help ACM to better understand where it stands in terms of diversity to be able to focus on areas of improvement.
It is mandatory for the submitting author (but you can select “prefer not to submit”) and it is desirable that you fill it out for all authors.
This information will be deleted from EasyChair after the conference.”
To evaluate the likelihood of privacy protection, one should pay attention to the EasyChair Terms of Service, particularly Section 6 “Use of Personal Information”. More investigation may allow a better assessment of the level of risk if our members choose to enter personal information. Your Public Policy Officer is working with the other SIGAI officers to clarify the issues and make recommendations for possible changes in ACM policy.
Please send your views on this topic to SIGAI and contribute comments to this Blog.
Policy News Matters
At their annual meeting this week, the American Medical Association produced a statement “AMA Passes First Policy Recommendations on Augmented Intelligence”, adopting broad policy recommendations for health and technology stakeholders. The statement quotes AMA Board Member Jesse M. Ehrenfeld as follows: “As technology continues to advance and evolve, we have a unique opportunity to ensure that augmented intelligence is used to benefit patients, physicians, and the broad health care community. Combining AI methods and systems with an irreplaceable human clinician can advance the delivery of care in a way that outperforms what either can do alone. But we must forthrightly address challenges in the design, evaluation and implementation as this technology is increasingly integrated into physicians’ delivery of care to patients.”