Information Technology Privacy and the Protection of Personal Data

Information technology allows us to generate, store, and process huge quantities of data. Search engines, satellites, sensor networks, scientists, security agencies, marketers, and database managers are processing terabytes of data per day. A good part of these data are about persons – about their characteristics, their thoughts, their movements, behaviour, communications, and preferences – or they can be used to produce such data. All countries and cultures in the present and past have constrained access to certain types of personal data in some way or the other (see Moore 1984). There are etiquettes, customs, artefacts, technologies, or laws, and combinations thereof, which prevent or proscribe against the use or dissemination of personal information. Walls, curtains, doors, veils, sealed envelopes, sunglasses, clothes, locked cabinets, privacy laws, secure databases, cryptographic keys, and passwords all serve the purpose of preventing individual persons to acquire and use information about other persons. The issues are often discussed in the context of a specific social sector or professional domain, such as health care, social or homeland security, search engines, marketing, or policing. More specifically the issues can be concerned with camera surveillance, the monitoring of Internet communications, the retention of Internet traffic data, the disclosure of passenger lists to security agencies, the availability of individual medical information in the public health system, the linking and matching of databases in social security to detect fraud, and sifting and trawling through financial databases in order to find suspect transactions.

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Data and Resources
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Additional Info
Field Value
Author Van Den Hoven, Jeroen
Category Privacy
DOI http://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498725.016
Group Ethics and Legality
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Source Information Technology and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy, pp. 301-321)
Thematic Cluster Privacy Enhancing Technology [PET]
system:type BookChapter
Management Info
Field Value
Author Candela Leonardo
Maintainer Candela Leonardo
Version 1
Last Updated 29 April 2021, 11:23 (CEST)
Created 29 April 2021, 11:23 (CEST)