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Willis H. Ware
1. Introduction
2. Historical Development
3. United States Posture
4. Source of the Problem
5. Privacy as a Public Policy Issue
6. Contemporary Privacy
6.1 Current Example
7. Public Policy Again
7.1 An Illustration – CNI
8. The Broadened Public Issue
9. Possible Approaches to Protection
10. Related Effects
11. Privacy as Social Equity
12. New Privacy Versus Old
13. Context for New Privacy
14. Privacy Versus Public Distaste
15. The Future for Privacy
16. References
Throughout the 1970s, “the problem” was generally seen to be with government which at the time was by far the biggest holder of personal information. While there may today in industry be databases that rival the size of the largest government ones, the Federal establishment certainly still has the biggest collection of large databases within one organizational structure. It is safe to say that the Federal government is still the biggest record keeper in the country. In addition, many agencies of government have broad powers of enforcement which add to the image of the Federal government as the problem.
By way of clarification, note the relationship between privacy and security. The personal privacy issue is an information-use issue, only secondarily an information-protection issue. If use of information is to be controlled, then access to it must be controlled; this is a basic tenet of computer security.
In occasional instances the protection issue is more direct. Sometimes personal information has been declared confidential or private by law; for example, census data from the very beginning, taxpayer data starting in 1976, and certain data relevant to law enforcement and the justice system. By implication, such categories of legally identified data require protection, which however is usually not defined in detail. From a computer security standpoint, one does not know whether protection implies restriction of access and/or restricted usage and/or proof against unauthorized change and/or timely updating and/or what. Such dimensions are left to the holding agency to decide.
In contrast to only a few instances of legally prescribed protection, the Privacy Act applies to all agencies of government and with exceptions for a few categories of data such as classified and intelligence data, it seeks to control the usage of personal information.
Go to: 5. Privacy as a Public Policy Issue
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