Information privacy, also known as data privacy or data protection, is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them.
Various types of personal information often come under privacy concerns. Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information or other sensitive information is collected, stored, used, and finally destroyed or deleted – in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues. Informed consent mechanisms including privacy policies and dynamic consent are important in communicating to data subjects the different uses of their personally identifiable information.
History In 1890, legal scholars Samuel D. Warren II and Louis Brandeis published "The Right to Privacy", an article explaining "the right to be let alone," which helped establish a right to privacy in the United States. Their guidelines set the foundation for how privacy can be understood in terms of personal data, and influenced the development of the privacy laws of the United States.
In the United States, the Privacy Act of 1974 represented an achievement in information privacy law. The law set a Code of Fair Information Practice to govern how federal agencies collect personal information and data. After the Watergate and COINTELPRO scandals involving illegal government use of surveillance, this privacy law was intended to help restore public trust in the government. The Act allowed a person to have the right to access information about themselves and know how their information would be used.
The growth of the internet's popularity in the early 2000s presented different privacy concerns as many companies and organizations began to collect user's personal data. Scholars such as Daniel Solove explained the importance of informed consent.
In 2018, the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal introduced new privacy risks to the public. A consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica collected personal user data from over 85 million Facebook users without informed consent. The data collected was used to assist in politically targeted ads during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This resulted in the United States Federal Trade Commission fining Facebook $5 billion. The Cambridge Analytica scandal influenced new legislation such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation.
Types of information privacy Data privacy issues may arise in response to information from a wide range of sources, such as: Healthcare records Criminal justice investigations and proceedings Financial institutions and transactions Biological traits, such as genetic material Residence and geographic records Privacy breach Location-based service and geolocation Web surfing behavior or user preferences using persistent cookies Academic research
Financial
Information about a person's financial transactions, including the amount of assets, positions held in stocks or funds, outstanding debts, and purchases can be sensitive. If criminals gain access to information such as a person's accounts or credit card numbers, that person could become the victim of fraud or identity theft. Information about a person's purchases can reveal a great deal about that person's history, such as places they have visited, whom they have contact with, products they have used, their activities and habits, or medications they have used. In some cases, corporations may use this information to target individuals with marketing customized towards those individual's personal preferences, which that person may or may not approve.
Internet
The ability to control the information one reveals about oneself over the internet and who can access that information has become a growing concern. These concerns include whether email can be stored or read by third parties without consent or whether third parties can continue to track the websites that someone visited. Another concern is whether websites one visits can collect, store, and possibly share personally identifiable information about users.
The advent of various search engines and the use of data mining created a capability for data about individuals to be collected and combined from a wide variety of sources very easily. Vol. 40 Issue 3, p. 18 AI facilitated creating inferential information about individuals and groups based on such enormous amounts of collected data, transforming the information economy. The FTC has provided a set of guidelines that represent widely accepted concepts concerning fair information practices in an electronic marketplace, called the Fair Information Practice Principles. But these have been critiqued for their insufficiency in the context of AI-enabled inferential information.
On the internet many users give away a lot of information about themselves: unencrypted emails can be read by the administrators of an e-mail server if the connection is not encrypted (no TLS), and also the internet service provider and other parties sniffing the network traffic of that connection are able to know the contents. The same applies to any kind of traffic generated on the Internet, including web browsing, instant messaging, and others. In order not to give away too much personal information, emails can be encrypted and browsing of webpages as well as other online activities can be done anonymously via anonymizers, or by open source distributed anonymizers, so-called mix networks. Nym and I2P are examples of well-known mix nets.
With social media and e-commerce sites being used more frequently, there are more potential openings for stealing consumer's data. Companies can see which types of products consumers like to purchase and can use targeted ads to try to make people purchase more items thinking that this is what they will want to purchase. However, sometimes this type of data is used without explicit consent.Federal Trade Commission. (2022). Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/reports
Users are unaware of all of the personal information that is collected about them. Cookies track browsing data and location settings show where a person is based out of, and can show shops or products that are physically located near someone.Smith, A. (2023). Tracking, cookies, and digital privacy: Understanding online data collection. Journal of Cyber Policy, 8(1), 45–61. These combined that be a big safety and privacy issue for users if their data is not being stored safely.
With laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), people's data can be protected and they asked for explicit consent before using said data.California Legislative Information. (2020). California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Retrieved from https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?division=3.&part=4.&lawCode=CIV Globally, many nations are trying to implement similar clauses to protect consumers.
Email is not the only internet content with privacy concerns. In an age where increasing amounts of information are online, social networking sites pose additional privacy challenges. People may be tagged in photos or have valuable information exposed about themselves either by choice or unexpectedly by others, referred to as participatory surveillance. Data about location can also be accidentally published, for example, when someone posts a picture with a store as a background. Caution should be exercised when posting information online. Social networks vary in what they allow users to make private and what remains publicly accessible. Without strong security settings in place and careful attention to what remains public, a person can be profiled by searching for and collecting disparate pieces of information, leading to cases of cyberstalking or reputation damage.
Cookies are used on websites so that users may allow the website to retrieve some information from the user's internet, but they usually do not mention what the data being retrieved is. In 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed a regulation that forces websites to visibly disclose to consumers their information privacy practices, referred to as cookie notices. This was issued to give consumers the choice of what information about their behavior they consent to letting websites track; however, its effectiveness is controversial. Some websites may engage in deceptive practices such as placing cookie notices in places on the page that are not visible or only giving consumers notice that their information is being tracked but not allowing them to change their privacy settings. Apps like Instagram and Facebook collect user data for a personalized app experience; however, they track user activity on other apps, which jeopardizes users' privacy and data. By controlling how visible these cookie notices are, companies can discreetly collect data, giving them more power over consumers.
Educational In the United Kingdom in 2012, the Education Secretary Michael Gove described the National Pupil Database as a "rich dataset" whose value could be "maximised" by making it more openly accessible, including to private companies. Kelly Fiveash of The Register said that this could mean "a child's school life including exam results, attendance, teacher assessments and even characteristics" could be available, with third-party organizations being responsible for anonymizing any publications themselves, rather than the data being anonymized by the government before being handed over. An example of a data request that Gove indicated had been rejected in the past, but might be possible under an improved version of privacy regulations, was for "analysis on sexual exploitation".
Cable television This describes the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over cable television, and who can access that information. For example, third parties can track IP TV programs someone has watched at any given time.
Academic research Within academia, Institutional Review Boards function to assure that adequate measures are taken to ensure both the privacy and confidentiality of human subjects in research.
Data breaches and privacy risks When an individual or group of people steal consumer's data it is considered a breach of data. It is a common threat to one's information privacy. This includes information such as names, date of birth, credit card information, and social security numbers.
These types of data breaches can happen when companies do not have the most current or secure infrastructure to secure and encrypt data. A small gap can open data to being leaked from outsiders. It should also be noted that breaches can happen from inside employees exposing information too. Companies are investing time in teaching about suspicious activity and using multi factor authentication systems.
On a federal level in Europe, governments are now mandating that companies report breaches in a timely manner.European Parliament. (2016). General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Regulation (EU) 2016/679. In America HIPAA functions in a similar way and notifies patients when data has been exposed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2021). Health Information Privacy. Retrieved from https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/index.html With types of guidelines in place, companies and countries are working to protect personal information and explain how personal data can and should be used.