Data Privacy Symposium Presents Privacy Insights and AI Understandings

The Data Privacy Group hosted its seventh annual student-led symposium on February 6th at Lewis & Clark Law School. The theme of the conference was “Technology and Law: Searching for Alignment”. The symposium focused on current data privacy issues with a panel by the DOJ Privacy Unit for the first half of the symposium, and the last half featured lectures from AI legal experts.

“We wanted to explore the topic of AI this year,” says Violet McAfee, President of Data Privacy Group, “Privacy professionals have been tasked with AI governance in many firms due to the overlapping nature of both fields. As companies continue to implement AI, they open themselves up to unique risks that lawyers ought to understand.”

The symposium began with a presentation by the Privacy Unit of the DOJ which investigates privacy and data breach matters, and enforces consumer privacy laws such as the Oregon Consumer Information Protection Act, which governs data breaches, and the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act, which protects Oregon consumers and their personal data. Kristen Hilton, Assistant Attorney-In-Charge, Dr. Katie Blevins, Privacy Analyst, and Jordan Pahl, Assistant Attorney General, led a panel discussion about the updates in Oregon privacy law, new consumer protection challenges, and enforcement initiatives, including enforcing new opt out provisions and educating the public on privacy issues.

“It was great to learn from the Department of Justice about how they have been applying the Oregon Consumer Privacy Act and what they do to educate the public about data privacy,” remarked Matthew Cochrane, a 1L at Lewis & Clark who had worked as a software engineer prior to law school.

The lunch hours included a networking session for attorneys and law students, and provided a great opportunity for students to converse with in-house counsel, prosecutors, defenders, and consumer rights advocates in the data privacy field.

The afternoon presentation on A.I. was given by Dan Housley, an in-counsel at Kyndryl, a company that specializes in A.I. models and cloud storage. He explained how A.I. models work and discussed new A.I. governance and their effect on data privacy.

The final speaker of the day was Hannah Pageler who taught from her experience as a Data Privacy Counsel to ZoomInfo about the risks and considerations when using AI tools in practice.