Reading: Information Privacy

Information privacy, or data privacy (or data protection),

is the relationship between collection and dissemination of
data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, and the
legal and political issues surrounding them.
Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable
information or other sensitive information is collected and
stored—in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent
disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues.
Data privacy issues can 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
• Ethnicity
• Privacy breach
• Location-based service and geolocation
The challenge in data privacy is to share data while
protecting personally identifiable information. The fields of
data security and information security design and utilize
software, hardware and human resources to address this
issue. As the laws and regulations related to Data Protection
are constantly changing, it is important to keep abreast of
any changes in the law and continually reassess your
compliance with data privacy and security regulations.
Information types
Various types of personal information often come under
privacy concerns.
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 web sites someone has visited. Another
concern is web sites which are visited 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. 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.
In order not to give away too much personal information, e-
mails should be encrypted and browsing of webpages as
well as other online activities should be done trace-less via
anonymizers, or, in cases those are not trusted, by open
source distributed anonymizers, so-called mix nets, such as
I2P – The Onion Router or Tor.
Email isn’t the only Internet use with concern of privacy.
Everything is accessible over the Internet nowadays.
However a major issue with privacy relates back to social
networking. For example, there are millions of users on
Facebook, and regulations have changed. People may be
tagged in photos or have valuable information exposed
about themselves either by choice or most of the time
unexpectedly by others. It is important to be cautious of what
is being said over the Internet and what information is being
displayed as well as photos because this all can searched
across the web and used to access private databases
making it easy for anyone to quickly go online and profile a
person.
Cable television
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.
The addition of any information in a broadcasting stream is
not required for an audience rating survey, additional
devices are not requested to be installed in the houses of
viewers or listeners, and without the necessity of their
cooperation, audience ratings can be automatically
performed in real-time.
Medical
A person may not wish for their medical records to be
revealed to others. This may be because they have concern
that it might affect their insurance coverages or employment.
Or it may be because they would not wish for others to know
about medical or psychological conditions or treatments
which would be embarrassing. Revealing medical data could
also reveal other details about one’s personal life. Privacy
Breach There are three major categories of medical privacy:
informational (the degree of control over personal
information), physical (the degree of physical inaccessibility
to others), and psychological (the extent to which the doctor
respects patients’ cultural beliefs, inner thoughts, values,
feelings, and religious practices and allows them to make
personal decisions). Physicians and psychiatrists in many
cultures and countries have standards for doctor-patient
relationships which include maintaining confidentiality. In
some cases, the physician-patient privilege is legally
protected. These practices are in place to protect the dignity
of patients, and to ensure that patients will feel free to reveal
complete and accurate information required for them to
receive the correct treatment. The United States has laws
governing privacy of private health information, see HIPAA
and the HITECH Act.
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 he/she has visited, whom
he/she has contacted with, products he/she has used,
his/her activities and habits, or medications he/she has used.
In some cases corporations might wish to use this
information to target individuals with marketing customized
towards those individual’s personal preferences, something
which that person may or may not approve.
Locational
 The dots show all the locations logged by an iPhone without the user’s
knowledge.
As location tracking capabilities of mobile devices are
increasing (Location-based service), problems related to
user privacy arise. Location data is indeed among the most
sensitive data currently being collected. A list of potentially
sensitive professional and personal information that could be
inferred about an individual knowing only his mobility trace
was published recently by the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. These include the movements of a competitor
sales force, attendance of a particular church or an
individual’s presence in a motel or at an abortion clinic. A
recent MIT study by de Montjoye et al. showed that 4 spatio-
temporal points, approximate places and times, are enough
to uniquely identify 95% of 1.5M people in a mobility
database. The study further shows that these constraints
hold even when the resolution of the dataset is low.
Therefore, even coarse or blurred datasets provide little
anonymity.
Political
Political privacy has been a concern since voting systems
emerged in ancient times. The secret ballot is the simplest
and most widespread measure to ensure that political views
are not known to anyone other than the voter him/herself—it
is nearly universal in modern democracy, and considered to
be a basic right of citizenship. In fact even where other rights
of privacy do not exist, this type of privacy very often does.
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 “maximized” 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.”
Legality
The legal protection of the right to privacy in general – and of
data privacy in particular – varies greatly around the world.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his
privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks
upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to
the protection of the law against such interference or
attacks.—Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article
12
There is a significant challenge for organizations that hold
sensitive data to achieve and maintain compliance with so
many regulations that have relevance to information privacy.
Safe Harbor Program and Passenger Name
Record issues

Commandant of the Coast Guard Adm. Thad W. Allen, right, delivers remarks
as Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead looks on after the signing
of the memorandum of agreement for the Safe Harbor program during a
signing ceremony at the Pentagon.
The United States Department of Commerce created the
International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles certification
program in response to the1995 Directive on Data Protection
(Directive 95/46/EC) of the European Commission. Directive
95/46/EC declares in Chapter IV Article 25 that personal
data may only be transferred from the countries in the
European Economic Area to countries which provide
adequate privacy protection. Historically, establishing
adequacy required the creation of national laws broadly
equivalent to those implemented by Directive 95/46/EU.
Although there are exceptions to this blanket prohibition – for
example where the disclosure to a country outside the EEA
is made with the consent of the relevant individual (Article
26(1)(a)) – they are limited in practical scope. As a result,
Article 25 created a legal risk to organizations which transfer
personal data from Europe to the United States.
The program has an important issue on the exchange of
Passenger Name Record information between the EU and
the US. According to the EU directive, personal data may
only be transferred to third countries if that country provides
an adequate level of protection. Some exceptions to this rule
are provided, for instance when the controller himself can
guarantee that the recipient will comply with the data
protection rules.
The European Commission has set up the “Working party on
the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Processing of
Personal Data,” commonly known as the “Article 29 Working
Party”. The Working Party gives advice about the level of
protection in the European Union and third countries.
The Working Party negotiated with U.S. representatives
about the protection of personal data, the Safe Harbor
Principles were the result. Notwithstanding that approval, the
self-assessment approach of the Safe Harbor remains
controversial with a number of European privacy regulators
and commentators.
The Safe Harbor program addresses this issue in a unique
way: rather than a blanket law imposed on all organizations
in the United States, a voluntary program is enforced by the
FTC. U.S. organizations which register with this program,
having self-assessed their compliance with a number of
standards, are “deemed adequate” for the purposes of
Article 25. Personal information can be sent to such
organizations from the EEA without the sender being in
breach of Article 25 or its EU national equivalents. The Safe
Harbor was approved as providing adequate protection for
personal data, for the purposes of Article 25(6), by the
European Commission on 26 July 2000.
The Safe Harbor is not a perfect solution to the challenges
posed by Article 25. In particular, adoptee organisations
need to carefully consider their compliance with the onward
transfer obligations, where personal data originating in the
EU is transferred to the US Safe Harbor, and then onward to
a third country. The alternative compliance approach of
“binding corporate rules”, recommended by many EU privacy
regulators, resolves this issue. In addition, any dispute
arising in relation to the transfer of HR data to the US Safe
Harbor must be heard by a panel of EU privacy regulators.
In July 2007, a new, controversial, Passenger Name Record
agreement between the US and the EU was undersigned. A
short time afterwards, the Bush administration gave
exemption for the Department of Homeland Security, for the
Arrival and Departure Information System (ADIS) and for the
Automated Target System from the 1974 Privacy Act.
In February 2008, Jonathan Faull, the head of the EU’s
Commission of Home Affairs, complained about the US
bilateral policy concerning PNR. The US had signed in
February 2008 a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with
the Czech Republic in exchange of a VISA waiver scheme,
without concerting before with Brussels. The tensions
between Washington and Brussels are mainly caused by a
lesser level of data protection in the US, especially since
foreigners do not benefit from the US Privacy Act of 1974.
Other countries approached for bilateral MOU included the
United Kingdom, Estonia, Germany and Greece.
Protecting privacy in information systems
As heterogeneous information systems with differing privacy
rules are interconnected and information is shared, policy
appliances will be required to reconcile, enforce and monitor
an increasing amount of privacy policy rules (and laws).
There are two categories of technology to address privacy
protection in commercial IT systems: communication and
enforcement.
Policy Communication
• P3P—The Platform for Privacy Preferences. P3P is a
standard for communicating privacy practices and
comparing them to the preferences of individuals.
Policy Enforcement
• XACML—The Extensible Access Control Markup
Language together with its Privacy Profile is a standard
for expressing privacy policies in a machine-readable
language which a software system can use to enforce
 the policy in enterprise IT systems.
• EPAL—The Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language is
very similar to XACML, but is not yet a standard.
• WS-Privacy—”Web Service Privacy” will be a specification
for communicating privacy policy in web services. For
example, it may specify how privacy policy information
can be embedded in the SOAP envelope of a web
service message.
Protecting Privacy on the Internet
On the Internet you almost always give away a lot of
information about yourself: Unencrypted e-mails can be read
by the administrators of the e-mail server, if the connection is
not encrypted (no https), and also the Internet service
provider and other parties sniffing the traffic of that
connection are able to know the contents. Furthermore, the
same applies to any kind of traffic generated on the Internet
(web-browsing,instant messaging, among others) In order
not to give away too much personal information, e-mails can
be encrypted and browsing of webpages as well as other
online activities can be done traceless via anonymizers, or,
in cases those are not trusted, by open source distributed
anonymizers, so called mix nets. Renowned open-source
mix nets are I2P—The Anonymous Network or tor.