Definition
Privacy helps to establish personal autonomy and create individualism. Privacy is a state or condition of limited access to a person (e.g., client). In particular, information privacy relates to an individual’s right to determine how, when, and to what extent information about the self will be released to another person or to an organization.
Key Points
With the rising occurrence of information privacy violations, people have begun to take interest in how, when, and where their personal information is being used. People usually interchange the concepts of security with privacy. In fact, they are essentially two different concepts used to protect data. In general, security involves the use of cryptographic tools to protect information in terms of confidentiality, availability, and access control and integrity enforcement. Privacy mainly focuses on the ability of keeping data away from public access, and the way to protect it according to the individual rights.
There are various definitions of privacy in the literature. Some researchers describe confidentiality as privacy, while some regard privacy as an aspect different from using cryptographic tools. Anderson [1] defined privacy as secrecy for benefit of the individual, and confidentiality as secrecy for the benefit of the organization. Alternatively, privacy can also be described by the ability to have control over the collection, storage, access, communication, manipulation and disposition of data. Privacy is also referred as the right for individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. As Westin [2] notes,
No definition [of privacy]… is possible, because [those] issues are fundamentally matters of values, interests and power.
It can be said that privacy is a much broader concept than security; privacy protection is based on security protection. Security may enable privacy protection from authorized access, but security alone cannot provide privacy.
To enhance the privacy protection of personal information, legislative schemas and practice guidelines have been proposed by different organizations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) Data Protection Act. These legislations and requirements can be abstracted as access control policies or rules to serve as a privacy foundation to control access to personal information.
Recommended Reading
Anderson RJ. A security policy model for clinical information systems. In: Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy; the 1996.
Westin A. Privacy and freedom. New York: Atheneum; 1967.
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Hung, P.C.K., Cheng, V.S.Y. (2018). Privacy. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_274
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