Data Privacy In The Information Age

In a revealing study of how digital dossiers are created (usually without our knowledge), the author argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is and what it means in the digital age, and then reform the laws that define and regulate it. Reprint.

Electronic information networks offer extraordinary advantages to business, government, and individuals in terms of power, capacity, speed, accessibility, and cost. But these same capabilities present substantial privacy issues. With an unprecedented amount of data available in digital format--which is easier and less expensive to access, manipulate, and store--others know more about you than ever before. Consider this: data routinely collected about you includes your health, credit, marital, educational, and employment histories; the times and telephone numbers of every call you make and receive; the magazines you subscribe to and the books your borrow from the library; your cash withdrawals; your purchases by credit card or check; your electronic mail and telephone messages; where you go on the World Wide Web. The ramifications of such a readily accessible storehouse of information are astonishing. Governments have responded to these new challenges to personal privacy in a wide variety of ways. At one extreme, the European Union in 1995 enacted sweeping regulation to protect personal information; at the other extreme, privacy law in the United States and many other countries is fragmented, inconsistent, and offers little protection for privacy on the internet and other electronic networks. For all the passion that surrounds discussions about privacy, and the recent attention devoted to electronic privacy, surprisingly little consensus exists about what privacy means, what values are served--or compromised--by extending further legal protection to privacy, what values are affected by existing and proposed measures designed to protect privacy, and what principles should undergird a sensitive balancing of those values. In this book, Fred Cate addresses these critical issues in the context of computerized information. He provides an overview of the technologies that are provoking the current privacy debate and discusses the range of legal issues that these technologies raise. He examines the central elements that make up the definition of privacy and the values served, and liabilities incurred, by each of those components. Separate chapters address the regulation of privacy in Europe and the United States. The final chapter identifies four sets of principles for protecting information privacy. The principles recognize the significance of individual and collective nongovernmental action, the limited role for privacy laws and government enforcement of those laws, and the ultimate goal of establishing multinational principles for protecting information privacy. Privacy in the Information Age involves questions that cut across the fields of business, communications, economics, and law. Cate examines the debate in provocative, jargon-free, detail.

Companies from various sectors of the economy are confronted with the new phenomenon of digital transformation and are faced with the challenge of formulating and implementing a company-wide strategy to incorporate what are often viewed as “disruptive” technologies. These technologies are sometimes associated with significant and extremely rapid change, in some cases with even the replacement of established business models. Many of these technologies have been deployed in unison by leading-edge companies acting as the catalyst for significant process change and people skills enhancement. The Handbook of Research on Digital Transformation, Industry Use Cases, and the Impact of Disruptive Technologies examines the phenomenon of digital transformation and the impact of disruptive technologies through the lens of industry case studies where different combinations of these new technologies have been deployed and incorporated into enterprise IT and business strategies. Covering topics including chatbot implementation, multinational companies, cloud computing, internet of things, artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, immersive technologies, and social media, this book is essential for senior management, IT managers, technologists, computer scientists, cybersecurity analysts, academicians, researchers, IT consultancies, professors, and students.

Privacy and data protection are recognized as fundamental human rights. Recent developments, however, indicate that security issues are used to undermine these fundamental rights. As new technologies effectively facilitate collection, storage, processing and combination of personal data government agencies take advantage for their own purposes. Increasingly, and for other reasons, the business sector threatens the privacy of citizens as well. The contributions to this book explore the different aspects of the relationship between technology and privacy. The emergence of new technologies threaten increasingly privacy and/or data protection; however, little is known about the potential of these technologies that call for innovative and prospective analysis, or even new conceptual frameworks. Technology and privacy are two intertwined notions that must be jointly analyzed and faced. Technology is a social practice that embodies the capacity of societies to transform themselves by creating the possibility to generate and manipulate not only physical objects, but also symbols, cultural forms and social relations. In turn, privacy describes a vital and complex aspect of these social relations. Thus technology influences people’s understanding of privacy, and people’s understanding of privacy is a key factor in defining the direction of technological development. This book was originally published as a special issue of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research.

Privacy is a growing concern in the United States and around the world. The spread of the Internet and the seemingly boundaryless options for collecting, saving, sharing, and comparing information trigger consumer worries. Online practices of business and government agencies may present new ways to compromise privacy, and e-commerce and technologies that make a wide range of personal information available to anyone with a Web browser only begin to hint at the possibilities for inappropriate or unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary examination of privacy in the information age. It explores such important concepts as how the threats to privacy evolving, how can privacy be protected and how society can balance the interests of individuals, businesses and government in ways that promote privacy reasonably and effectively? This book seeks to raise awareness of the web of connectedness among the actions one takes and the privacy policies that are enacted, and provides a variety of tools and concepts with which debates over privacy can be more fruitfully engaged. Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age focuses on three major components affecting notions, perceptions, and expectations of privacy: technological change, societal shifts, and circumstantial discontinuities. This book will be of special interest to anyone interested in understanding why privacy issues are often so intractable.

In a time in which new technologies make it easy to gather and process data, the discussion on privacy tends to focus exclusively on the protecting of personal data. To Serge Gutwirth, privacy involves far more. He advances the intriguing thesis that privacy is in fact the safeguard of personal freedom--the safeguard of the individual's freedom to decide who she or he is, what she or he does, and who knows about it. Any restriction on privacy thus means an infringement of personal freedom. And it's exactly this freedom that plays an essential role in every democracy.

This comprehensive reference covers the laws governing every area where data privacy and security is potentially at risk -- including government records, electronic surveillance, the workplace, medical data, financial information, commercial transactions, and online activity, including communications involving children.

Proposes a new way of thinking about information privacy that leverages law to protect disclosures in contexts of trust.