Hugging Face Selected for the French Data Protection Agency Enhanced Support Program

This blog post was originally published on LinkedIn on 05/15/2023

We are happy to announce that Hugging Face has been selected by the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) to benefit from its Enhanced Support program! This new program picked three companies with “strong potential for economic development” out of over 40 candidates, who will receive support in understanding and implementing their duties with respect to data protection - a daunting and necessary endeavor in the context of the rapidly evolving field of Artificial Intelligence.

When it comes to respecting people’s privacy rights, the recent developments in ML and AI pose new questions, and engender new challenges. We have been particularly sensitive to these challenges in our own work at Hugging Face and in our collaborations. The BigScience Workshop that we hosted in collaboration with hundreds of researchers from many different countries and institutions was the first Large Language Model training effort to visibly put privacy front and center, through a multi-pronged approach covering data selection and governance, data processing, and model sharing. The more recent BigCode project co-hosted with ServiceNow also dedicated significant resources to addressing privacy risks, creating new tools to support pseudonymization that will benefit other projects. These efforts help us better understand what is technically necessary and feasible at various levels of the AI development process so we can better address legal requirements and risks tied to personal data.

The accompaniment program from the CNIL, benefiting from its expertise and role as France’s Data Protection Agency, will play an instrumental role in supporting our broader efforts to push GDPR compliance forward and provide clarity for our community of users on questions of privacy and data protection. We look forward to working together on addressing these questions with more foresight, and helping develop amazing new ML technology that does respect people’s data rights!