But Ruckle’s office has grown a lot in the past six years, both in headcount and responsibility. At the NASCIO Annual Conference in San Diego, she said she now has taken on work in areas like contract negotiations and public records.
“And then of course AI has overturned the applecart in some ways in terms of almost taking over the role in terms of what we’re focusing on,” Ruckle said.
She explained that finding people who were passionate about what she was doing was key early in her tenure as CPO, and those privacy champions helped build momentum across Washington government. AI has made it faster and easier to process data — she pointed to areas like natural resources, which in Washington includes data around tracking salmon and wildfires — but that means her team also needs to be careful about how the state processes personal data, like healthcare information.
Ruckle said one of the advantages to AI is that it is “a multidisciplinary technology,” bringing together experts from different areas and helping to break down some of the silos that can sometimes make it hard to get the data everyone needs. But she says caution is needed in that data sharing.
“The piece is really classifying the data and making sure that we’re not combining the data in unexpected ways, getting away from the primary purpose of why we collected the data, so that we’re being very transparent in how we’re collecting and using the data,” Ruckle said.
Video Transcript:
So I don't think you necessarily need a new law to create a robust privacy program. It does take some resources, but if you prioritize your data governance and, uh, find people that are passionate about how the state is collecting and using data, which I was lucky to find a lot of people that were interested in this area when we first started.
And so I encourage other states that are starting out, and I know there are states that maybe just have one or two people that are really focused on this issue, then they can sort of start there and sort of find their privacy champions and, um, help them work on some of the data governance work that has become, I think, even more important as we're starting to use new technologies.
So the impact of AI, and especially around data and personal data, is because of its speed and scale, we can do a lot more with data than we used to be able to do in a short period of time, which can be terrific in terms of giving us great new insights.
And AI just can give us the skills to make inferences on data that people never expected, even things that we didn't know about ourselves. And so that is where we really need to be focused in terms of the privacy, potential privacy harms and risks in how we're analyzing and using AI with the data.
