Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data , technology , the public expectation of privacy , contextual information norms , and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data privacy or data protection .
102-471: Various types of personal information often come under privacy concerns. This describes 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
204-473: A web of trust , the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures drew attention to certificate authorities as a potential weak point allowing man-in-the-middle attacks . An important property in this context is forward secrecy , which ensures that encrypted communications recorded in the past cannot be retrieved and decrypted should long-term secret keys or passwords be compromised in the future. Not all web servers provide forward secrecy. For HTTPS to be effective,
306-499: A United States federal law, establishes a Code of Fair Information Practice that governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information about individuals that is maintained in systems of records by federal agencies. One of the primary focuses of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is to protect a patient's Protected Health Information (PHI), which
408-444: A broader category of data and information than in some US law. In particular, online behavioral advertising businesses based in the US but surreptitiously collecting information from people in other countries in the form of cookies, bugs , trackers and the like may find that their preference to avoid the implications of wanting to build a psychographic profile of a particular person using
510-482: 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 voters themselves—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. There are several forms of voting fraud or privacy violations possible with
612-694: A correctly configured web server, eavesdroppers can infer the IP address and port number of the web server, and sometimes even the domain name (e.g. www.example.org, but not the rest of the URL) that a user is communicating with, along with the amount of data transferred and the duration of the communication, though not the content of the communication. Web browsers know how to trust HTTPS websites based on certificate authorities that come pre-installed in their software. Certificate authorities are in this way being trusted by web browser creators to provide valid certificates. Therefore,
714-625: A customer of the EE mobile phone operator in the UK. Another category can be referred to as financial identity theft, which usually entails bank account and credit card information being stolen, and then being used or sold. Personal data can also be used to create fake online identities, including fake accounts and profiles (which can be referred as identity cloning or identity fraud ) for celebrities to gather data from other users more easily. Even individuals can be concerned, especially for personal purposes (this
816-561: 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. Personal Information Personal data , also known as personal information or personally identifiable information ( PII ), is any information related to an identifiable person. The abbreviation PII
918-929: 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. People may not wish for their medical records to be revealed to others due to the confidentiality and sensitivity of what the information could reveal about their health. For example, they might be concerned that it might affect their insurance coverage or employment. Or, it may be because they would not wish for others to know about any medical or psychological conditions or treatments that would bring embarrassment upon themselves. Revealing medical data could also reveal other details about one's personal life. 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
1020-414: A name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person A simple example of this distinction: the color name "red" by itself is not personal data, but that same value stored as part of a person's record as their "favorite color" is personal data; it
1122-690: A number of types, including Extended Validation Certificates . Let's Encrypt , launched in April 2016, provides free and automated service that delivers basic SSL/TLS certificates to websites. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation , Let's Encrypt will make switching from HTTP to HTTPS "as easy as issuing one command, or clicking one button." The majority of web hosts and cloud providers now leverage Let's Encrypt, providing free certificates to their customers. The system can also be used for client authentication in order to limit access to
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#17328519999761224-549: A particular address and port combination. In the past, this meant that it was not feasible to use name-based virtual hosting with HTTPS. A solution called Server Name Indication (SNI) exists, which sends the hostname to the server before encrypting the connection, although many old browsers do not support this extension. Support for SNI is available since Firefox 2, Opera 8, Apple Safari 2.1, Google Chrome 6, and Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista . A sophisticated type of man-in-the-middle attack called SSL stripping
1326-650: 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 they have visited, whom they have contact with, products they have used, their activities and habits, or medications they have used. In some cases, corporations may use this information to target individuals with marketing customized towards those individual's personal preferences, which that person may or may not approve. As heterogeneous information systems with differing privacy rules are interconnected and information
1428-491: A picture with a store as a background. Caution should be exercised when posting information online. Social networks vary in what they allow users to make private and what remains publicly accessible. Without strong security settings in place and careful attention to what remains public, a person can be profiled by searching for and collecting disparate pieces of information, leading to cases of cyberstalking or reputation damage. Cookies are used on websites so that users may allow
1530-532: A result, Article 25 created a legal risk to organizations which transfer personal data from Europe to the United States. The program regulates 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
1632-623: A series of legislation such as the GDPR to limit the distribution and accessibility of PII. Important confusion arises around whether PII means information which is identifiable (that is, can be associated with a person) or identifying (that is, associated uniquely with a person, such that the PII identifies them). In prescriptive data privacy regimes such as the US federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), PII items have been specifically defined. In broader data protection regimes such as
1734-461: A site must be completely hosted over HTTPS. If some of the site's contents are loaded over HTTP (scripts or images, for example), or if only a certain page that contains sensitive information, such as a log-in page, is loaded over HTTPS while the rest of the site is loaded over plain HTTP, the user will be vulnerable to attacks and surveillance. Additionally, cookies on a site served through HTTPS must have
1836-712: A user should trust an HTTPS connection to a website if and only if all of the following are true: HTTPS is especially important over insecure networks and networks that may be subject to tampering. Insecure networks, such as public Wi-Fi access points, allow anyone on the same local network to packet-sniff and discover sensitive information not protected by HTTPS. Additionally, some free-to-use and paid WLAN networks have been observed tampering with webpages by engaging in packet injection in order to serve their own ads on other websites. This practice can be exploited maliciously in many ways, such as by injecting malware onto webpages and stealing users' private information. HTTPS
1938-571: A valid name with the correct SSN is SB1386 "personal information". The combination of a name with a context may also be considered PII; for example, if a person's name is on a list of patients for an HIV clinic. However, it is not necessary for the name to be combined with a context in order for it to be PII. The reason for this distinction is that bits of information such as names, although they may not be sufficient by themselves to make an identification, may later be combined with other information to identify persons and expose them to harm. The scope of
2040-415: A variety of uses. Sources, usually Internet -based since the 1990s, may include census and electoral roll records, social networking sites , court reports and purchase histories. The information from data brokers may be used in background checks used by employers and housing. HTTPS This is an accepted version of this page Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure ( HTTPS ) is an extension of
2142-764: A warning across the entire window. Newer browsers also prominently display the site's security information in the address bar . Extended validation certificates show the legal entity on the certificate information. Most browsers also display a warning to the user when visiting a site that contains a mixture of encrypted and unencrypted content. Additionally, many web filters return a security warning when visiting prohibited websites. The Electronic Frontier Foundation , opining that "In an ideal world, every web request could be defaulted to HTTPS", has provided an add-on called HTTPS Everywhere for Mozilla Firefox , Google Chrome , Chromium , and Android , which enables HTTPS by default for hundreds of frequently used websites. Forcing
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#17328519999762244-470: A web browser to load only HTTPS content has been supported in Firefox starting in version 83. Starting in version 94, Google Chrome is able to "always use secure connections" if toggled in the browser's settings. The security of HTTPS is that of the underlying TLS, which typically uses long-term public and private keys to generate a short-term session key , which is then used to encrypt the data flow between
2346-604: A web server to accept HTTPS connections, the administrator must create a public key certificate for the web server. This certificate must be signed by a trusted certificate authority for the web browser to accept it without warning. The authority certifies that the certificate holder is the operator of the web server that presents it. Web browsers are generally distributed with a list of signing certificates of major certificate authorities so that they can verify certificates signed by them. A number of commercial certificate authorities exist, offering paid-for SSL/TLS certificates of
2448-422: A web server to authorized users. To do this, the site administrator typically creates a certificate for each user, which the user loads into their browser. Normally, the certificate contains the name and e-mail address of the authorized user and is automatically checked by the server on each connection to verify the user's identity, potentially without even requiring a password. An important property in this context
2550-1055: Is perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Possessing one of the long-term asymmetric secret keys used to establish an HTTPS session should not make it easier to derive the short-term session key to then decrypt the conversation, even at a later time. Diffie–Hellman key exchange (DHE) and Elliptic-curve Diffie–Hellman key exchange (ECDHE) are in 2013 the only schemes known to have that property. In 2013, only 30% of Firefox, Opera, and Chromium Browser sessions used it, and nearly 0% of Apple's Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer sessions. TLS 1.3, published in August 2018, dropped support for ciphers without forward secrecy. As of February 2019 , 96.6% of web servers surveyed support some form of forward secrecy, and 52.1% will use forward secrecy with most browsers. As of July 2023 , 99.6% of web servers surveyed support some form of forward secrecy, and 75.2% will use forward secrecy with most browsers. A certificate may be revoked before it expires, for example because
2652-518: Is a form of "sensitive" personal data. The twelve Information Privacy Principles of the Privacy Act 1993 apply. New Zealand enacted the Privacy Act in 2020 to promote and protect individual privacy. The Federal Act on Data Protection of 19 June 1992 (in force since 1993) has set up a protection of privacy by prohibiting virtually any processing of personal data which is not expressly authorized by
2754-783: Is a physical sciences laboratory, and a non-regulatory agency of the United States Department of Commerce. Its mission is to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness. The following data, often used for the express purpose of distinguishing individual identity, clearly classify as personally identifiable information under the definition used by the NIST (described in detail below): The following are less often used to distinguish individual identity, because they are traits shared by many people. However, they are potentially PII, because they may be combined with other personal information to identify an individual. In forensics , particularly
2856-639: Is also important for connections over the Tor network , as malicious Tor nodes could otherwise damage or alter the contents passing through them in an insecure fashion and inject malware into the connection. This is one reason why the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project started the development of HTTPS Everywhere , which is included in Tor Browser. As more information is revealed about global mass surveillance and criminals stealing personal information,
2958-604: Is 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 their mobility trace was published in 2009 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 four spatio-temporal points, approximate places and times, are enough to uniquely identify 95% of 1.5 million people in
3060-727: Is controversial. Some websites may engage in deceptive practices such as placing cookie notices in places on the page that are not visible or only giving consumers notice that their information is being tracked but not allowing them to change their privacy settings. Apps like Instagram and Facebook collect user data for a personalized app experience; however, they track user activity on other apps, which jeopardizes users' privacy and data. By controlling how visible these cookie notices are, companies can discreetly collect data, giving them more power over consumers. As location tracking capabilities of mobile devices are advancing ( location-based services ), problems related to user privacy arise. Location data
3162-454: Is defined in EU directive 95/46/EC, for the purposes of the directive: Article 2a: 'personal data' shall mean any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity; In
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3264-537: Is designed to withstand such attacks and is considered secure against them (with the exception of HTTPS implementations that use deprecated versions of SSL). HTTP operates at the highest layer of the TCP/IP model —the application layer ; as does the TLS security protocol (operating as a lower sublayer of the same layer), which encrypts an HTTP message prior to transmission and decrypts a message upon arrival. Strictly speaking, HTTPS
3366-565: Is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission . 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
3468-491: Is lawfully made available to the general public from federal, state, or local government records. The concept of information combination given in the SB1386 definition is key to correctly distinguishing PII, as defined by OMB, from "personal information", as defined by SB1386. Information, such as a name, that lacks context cannot be said to be SB1386 "personal information", but it must be said to be PII as defined by OMB. For example,
3570-497: Is linked or linkable to an individual, such as medical, educational, financial, and employment information." For instance, a user's IP address is not classed as PII on its own, but is classified as a linked PII. Personal data is defined under the GDPR as "any information which [is] related to an identified or identifiable natural person". The IP address of an Internet subscriber may be classed as personal data. The concept of PII has become prevalent as information technology and
3672-430: Is more widely known as sockpuppetry ). The most critical information, such as one's password, date of birth, ID documents or social security number, can be used to log in to different websites (e.g. password reuse and account verification ) to gather more information and access more content. Also, several agencies ask for discretion on subjects related to their work, for the safety of their employees. For this reason,
3774-476: Is not a separate protocol, but refers to the use of ordinary HTTP over an encrypted SSL/TLS connection. HTTPS encrypts all message contents, including the HTTP headers and the request/response data. With the exception of the possible CCA cryptographic attack described in the limitations section below, an attacker should at most be able to discover that a connection is taking place between two parties, along with their domain names and IP addresses. To prepare
3876-439: Is not the only internet content with privacy concerns. In an age where increasing amounts of information are online, social networking sites pose additional privacy challenges. People may be tagged in photos or have valuable information exposed about themselves either by choice or unexpectedly by others, referred to as participatory surveillance . Data about location can also be accidentally published, for example, when someone posts
3978-456: Is only performed by the server. The mutual version requires the user to install a personal client certificate in the web browser for user authentication. In either case, the level of protection depends on the correctness of the implementation of the software and the cryptographic algorithms in use. SSL/TLS does not prevent the indexing of the site by a web crawler , and in some cases the URI of
4080-483: Is recommended to use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) with HTTPS to protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks, especially SSL stripping . HTTPS should not be confused with the seldom-used Secure HTTP (S-HTTP) specified in RFC 2660. As of April 2018 , 33.2% of Alexa top 1,000,000 websites use HTTPS as default and 70% of page loads (measured by Firefox Telemetry) use HTTPS. As of December 2022 , 58.4% of
4182-401: 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. Computer privacy can be improved through individualization . Currently security messages are designed for the "average user", i.e.
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4284-554: Is similar to PII. The U.S. Senate proposed the Privacy Act of 2005, which attempted to strictly limit the display, purchase, or sale of PII without the person's consent. Similarly, the (proposed) Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 attempted to prevent the acquiring of PII through phishing . U.S. lawmakers have paid special attention to the social security number because it can be easily used to commit identity theft . The (proposed) Social Security Number Protection Act of 2005 and (proposed) Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2005 each sought to limit
4386-532: Is the connection to the person that makes it personal data, not (as in PII) the value itself. Another term similar to PII, "personal information", is defined in a section of the California data breach notification law, SB1386: (e) For purposes of this section, "personal information" means an individual's first name or first initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements, when either
4488-477: Is widely used in the United States , but the phrase it abbreviates has four common variants based on personal or personally , and identifiable or identifying . Not all are equivalent, and for legal purposes the effective definitions vary depending on the jurisdiction and the purposes for which the term is being used. Under European Union and United Kingdom data protection regimes, which centre primarily on
4590-515: 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
4692-501: The EU rules, there has been a more specific notion that the data subject can potentially be identified through additional processing of other attributes—quasi- or pseudo-identifiers. In the GDPR, personal data is defined as: Any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as
4794-501: The Fair Information Practice Principles . But these have been critiqued for their insufficiency in the context of AI-enabled inferential information. On the internet many users give away a lot of information about themselves: unencrypted e-mails can be read by the administrators of an e-mail server if the connection is not encrypted (no HTTPS ), and also the internet service provider and other parties sniffing
4896-656: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the term "personal data" is significantly broader, and determines the scope of the regulatory regime. National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-122 defines personally identifiable information as "any information about an individual maintained by an agency, including (1) any information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity, such as name, social security number, date and place of birth, mother's maiden name, or biometric records; and (2) any other information that
4998-554: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network , and is widely used on the Internet . In HTTPS, the communication protocol is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS) or, formerly, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The protocol is therefore also referred to as HTTP over TLS , or HTTP over SSL . The principal motivations for HTTPS are authentication of
5100-476: The Internet have made it easier to collect PII leading to a profitable market in collecting and reselling PII. PII can also be exploited by criminals to stalk or steal the identity of a person, or to aid in the planning of criminal acts. As a response to these threats, many website privacy policies specifically address the gathering of PII , and lawmakers such as the European Parliament have enacted
5202-543: The NIST Guide to Protecting the Confidentiality of Personally Identifiable Information (SP 800-122). The OMB memorandum defines PII as follows: Information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual's identity, such as their name, social security number, biometric records, etc. alone, or when combined with other personal or recognizing linked or linkable information, such as date and place of birth, as well as
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#17328519999765304-512: The Privacy Act 1988 deals with the protection of individual privacy, using the OECD Privacy Principles from the 1980s to set up a broad, principles-based regulatory model (unlike in the US, where coverage is generally not based on broad principles but on specific technologies, business practices or data items). Section 6 has the relevant definition. The critical detail is that the definition of 'personal information' also applies to where
5406-617: The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has strict policies controlling release of personally identifiable information of DoD personnel. Many intelligence agencies have similar policies, sometimes to the point where employees do not disclose to their friends that they work for the agency. Similar identity protection concerns exist for witness protection programs, women's shelters , and victims of domestic violence and other threats. Personal information removal services work by identifying and requesting data brokers to delete
5508-569: The secure attribute enabled. On a site that has sensitive information on it, the user and the session will get exposed every time that site is accessed with HTTP instead of HTTPS. HTTPS URLs begin with "https://" and use port 443 by default, whereas, HTTP URLs begin with "http://" and use port 80 by default. HTTP is not encrypted and thus is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks , which can let attackers gain access to website accounts and sensitive information, and modify webpages to inject malware or advertisements. HTTPS
5610-648: The EU privacy website. On 1 June 2023, the Hong Kong Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data published an investigation report on a data breach involving the unauthorised access of a credit reference database platform. The Report highlights the need for organizations to take adequate steps to protect personal data as the mere imposition of contractual obligations and policies is insufficient if such obligations and policies are not effective or are not enforced. The Report also clarifies that credit data
5712-602: The European Union officially state that they are committed to upholding information privacy of individuals, but the former has caused friction between the two by failing to meet the standards of the EU's stricter laws on personal data. The negotiation of the Safe Harbor program was, in part, to address this long-running issue. Directive 95/46/EC declares in Chapter IV Article 25 that personal data may only be transferred from
5814-575: The GDPR, personal data is defined in a non-prescriptive principles-based way. Information that might not count as PII under HIPAA can be personal data for the purposes of GDPR. For this reason, "PII" is typically deprecated internationally. The U.S . government used the term "personally identifiable" in 2007 in a memorandum from the Executive Office of the President, Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and that usage now appears in US standards such as
5916-514: The Internet's 135,422 most popular websites have a secure implementation of HTTPS, However, despite TLS 1.3's release in 2018, adoption has been slow, with many still remaining on the older TLS 1.2 protocol. Most browsers display a warning if they receive an invalid certificate. Older browsers, when connecting to a site with an invalid certificate, would present the user with a dialog box asking whether they wanted to continue. Newer browsers display
6018-508: The above, such as "a 34-year-old white male who works at Target". Information can still be private , in the sense that a person may not wish for it to become publicly known, without being personally identifiable. Moreover, sometimes multiple pieces of information, none sufficient by itself to uniquely identify an individual, may uniquely identify a person when combined; this is one reason that multiple pieces of evidence are usually presented at criminal trials. It has been shown that, in 1990, 87% of
6120-445: The accessed website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data while it is in transit. It protects against man-in-the-middle attacks , and the bidirectional block cipher encryption of communications between a client and server protects the communications against eavesdropping and tampering . The authentication aspect of HTTPS requires a trusted third party to sign server-side digital certificates . This
6222-639: The authority responds, telling the browser whether the certificate is still valid or not. The CA may also issue a CRL to tell people that these certificates are revoked. CRLs are no longer required by the CA/Browser forum, nevertheless, they are still widely used by the CAs. Most revocation statuses on the Internet disappear soon after the expiration of the certificates. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption can be configured in two modes: simple and mutual . In simple mode, authentication
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#17328519999766324-412: The client and the server. X.509 certificates are used to authenticate the server (and sometimes the client as well). As a consequence, certificate authorities and public key certificates are necessary to verify the relation between the certificate and its owner, as well as to generate, sign, and administer the validity of certificates. While this can be more beneficial than verifying the identities via
6426-444: The client. This prompted the development of a countermeasure in HTTP called HTTP Strict Transport Security . HTTPS has been shown to be vulnerable to a range of traffic analysis attacks. Traffic analysis attacks are a type of side-channel attack that relies on variations in the timing and size of traffic in order to infer properties about the encrypted traffic itself. Traffic analysis is possible because SSL/TLS encryption changes
6528-406: The communication is authenticated . This is the case with HTTP transactions over the Internet, where typically only the server is authenticated (by the client examining the server's certificate ). HTTPS creates a secure channel over an insecure network. This ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks , provided that adequate cipher suites are used and that
6630-472: The contents of traffic, but has minimal impact on the size and timing of traffic. In May 2010, a research paper by researchers from Microsoft Research and Indiana University discovered that detailed sensitive user data can be inferred from side channels such as packet sizes. The researchers found that, despite HTTPS protection in several high-profile, top-of-the-line web applications in healthcare, taxation, investment, and web search, an eavesdropper could infer
6732-621: The controller themself 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
6834-633: The costs of doing so can be unclear. In relation to companies, consumers often have "imperfect information regarding when their data is collected, with what purposes, and with what consequences". Writing in 2015, Alessandro Acquisti, Curtis Taylor and Liad Wagman identified three "waves" in the trade of personal data: A data broker is an individual or company that specializes in collecting personal data (such as income, ethnicity, political beliefs, or geolocation data ) or data about people, mostly from public records but sometimes sourced privately, and selling or licensing such information to third parties for
6936-540: 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
7038-485: 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". 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
7140-486: The data subjects. The protection is subject to the authority of the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner . Additionally, any person may ask in writing a company (managing data files) the correction or deletion of any personal data. The company must respond within thirty days. The Privacy Act of 1974 (Pub.L. 93–579, 88 Stat. 1896, enacted 31 December 1974, 5 U.S.C. § 552a ,
7242-518: The data. 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 websites that someone visited. Another concern is whether websites one visits can collect, store, and possibly share personally identifiable information about users. The advent of various search engines and
7344-566: The different uses of their personally identifiable information. Data privacy issues may arise in response to information from a wide range of sources, such as: The United States Department of Commerce created the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles certification program in response to the 1995 Directive on Data Protection (Directive 95/46/EC) of the European Commission. Both the United States and
7446-464: The dignity of patients, and to ensure that patients feel free to reveal complete and accurate information required for them to receive the correct treatment. To view the United States' laws on governing privacy of private health information, see HIPAA and the HITECH Act . The Australian law is the Privacy Act 1988 Australia as well as state-based health records legislation. Political privacy has been
7548-523: The distribution of an individual's social security number. Additional U.S.-specific personally identifiable information includes, but is not limited to, I-94 records, Medicaid ID numbers, and Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.) documentation. Exclusivity of personally identifiable information affiliated with the U.S. highlights national data security concerns and the influence of personally identifiable information in U.S. federal data management systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
7650-415: 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
7752-477: The encrypted resource can be inferred by knowing only the intercepted request/response size. This allows an attacker to have access to the plaintext (the publicly available static content), and the encrypted text (the encrypted version of the static content), permitting a cryptographic attack . Because TLS operates at a protocol level below that of HTTP and has no knowledge of the higher-level protocols, TLS servers can only strictly present one certificate for
7854-812: The houses of viewers or listeners, and without the necessity of their cooperations, audience ratings can be automatically performed in real-time." In the United Kingdom in 2012, the Education Secretary Michael Gove described the National Pupil Database as a "rich dataset" whose value could be "maximised" 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
7956-456: The identification and prosecution of criminals, personally identifiable information is critical in establishing evidence in criminal procedure . Criminals may go to great trouble to avoid leaving any PII, such as by: Personal data is a key component of online identity and can be exploited by individuals. For instance, data can be altered and used to create fake documents, hijack mail boxes and phone calls or harass people, as occurred in 2019 to
8058-575: The illnesses/medications/surgeries of the user, his/her family income, and investment secrets. The fact that most modern websites, including Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, use HTTPS causes problems for many users trying to access public Wi-Fi hot spots, because a captive portal Wi-Fi hot spot login page fails to load if the user tries to open an HTTPS resource. Several websites, such as NeverSSL, guarantee that they will always remain accessible by HTTP. Netscape Communications created HTTPS in 1994 for its Netscape Navigator web browser. Originally, HTTPS
8160-512: The individual can be indirectly identified: "personal information" means information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable whether the information or opinion is true or not; and whether the information or opinion is recorded in a material form or not. It appears that this definition is significantly broader than the Californian example given above, and thus that Australian privacy law may cover
8262-462: The mother's maiden name, in official standards like the NIST Guide, demonstrates a proactive approach to ensuring robust privacy safeguards amid the dynamic landscape of data security. This integration into established standards is a foundational framework for organizations to adopt and implement effective measures in safeguarding individuals' personal information. A term similar to PII, "personal data",
8364-455: The name " John Smith " has no meaning in the current context and is therefore not SB1386 "personal information", but it is PII. A Social Security Number (SSN) without a name or some other associated identity or context information is not SB1386 "personal information", but it is PII. For example, the SSN 078-05-1120 by itself is PII, but it is not SB1386 "personal information". However the combination of
8466-442: The name or the data elements are not encrypted: (1) Social security number. (2) Driver's license number or California Identification Card number. (3) Account number, credit or debit card number, in combination with any required security code, access code, or password that would permit access to an individual's financial account. (f) For purposes of this section, "personal information" does not include publicly available information that
8568-536: The network traffic of that connection are able to know the contents. The same applies to any kind of traffic generated on the Internet, including web browsing , instant messaging , and 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 by open source distributed anonymizers, so-called mix networks . Well-known open-source mix nets include I2P – The Anonymous Network and Tor . Email
8670-486: The original, non-secure HTTP, primarily to protect page authenticity on all types of websites, secure accounts, and keep user communications, identity, and web browsing private. The Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme HTTPS has identical usage syntax to the HTTP scheme. However, HTTPS signals the browser to use an added encryption layer of SSL/TLS to protect the traffic. SSL/TLS is especially suited for HTTP, since it can provide some protection even if only one side of
8772-502: The personal information of their clients. This process can be manual or fully automated, but it is nevertheless complex because it involves dealing with numerous data brokers, each with different policies and procedures for data removal. During the second half of the 20th century, the digital revolution introduced "privacy economics", or the trade of personal data. The value of data can change over time and over different contexts. Disclosing data can reverse information asymmetry , though
8874-460: The population of the United States could be uniquely identified by gender, ZIP code , and full date of birth. In hacker and Internet slang , the practice of finding and releasing such information is called " doxing ". It is sometimes used to deter collaboration with law enforcement. On occasion, the doxing can trigger an arrest, particularly if law enforcement agencies suspect that the "doxed" individual may panic and disappear. In Australia,
8976-456: The privacy and confidentiality of human subjects in research. Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information or other sensitive information is collected, stored, used, and finally destroyed or deleted – in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues. Informed consent mechanisms including dynamic consent are important in communicating to data subjects
9078-474: 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 the following way: rather than a blanket law imposed on all organizations in the United States , a voluntary program
9180-560: The purposes of Article 25(6), by the European Commission on 26 July 2000. Under the Safe Harbor, adoptee organizations 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
9282-560: The rubric of 'we don't collect personal information' may find that this does not make sense under a broader definition like that in the Australian Privacy Act. The term "PII" is not used in Australian privacy law. European Union data protection law does not use the concept of personally identifiable information, and its scope is instead determined by non-synonymous, wider concept of "personal data". Further examples can be found on
9384-549: The same message for everyone. Researchers have posited that individualized messages and security "nudges", crafted based on users' individual differences and personality traits, can be used for further improvements for each person's compliance with computer security and privacy. Improve privacy through data encryption By converting data into a non-readable format, encryption prevents unauthorized access. At present, common encryption technologies include AES and RSA. Use data encryption so that only users with decryption keys can access
9486-477: The secrecy of the private key has been compromised. Newer versions of popular browsers such as Firefox , Opera , and Internet Explorer on Windows Vista implement the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) to verify that this is not the case. The browser sends the certificate's serial number to the certificate authority or its delegate via OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) and
9588-490: The server certificate is verified and trusted. Because HTTPS piggybacks HTTP entirely on top of TLS, the entirety of the underlying HTTP protocol can be encrypted. This includes the request's URL , query parameters, headers, and cookies (which often contain identifying information about the user). However, because website addresses and port numbers are necessarily part of the underlying TCP/IP protocols, HTTPS cannot protect their disclosure. In practice this means that even on
9690-501: The term "sensitive personal data" varies by jurisdiction. In the UK, personal health data is treated as "sensitive" and in need of additional data protection measures. According to the OMB, in the United States it is not always the case that PII is "sensitive", and context may be taken into account in deciding whether certain PII is or is not sensitive. When a person wishes to remain anonymous, descriptions of them will often employ several of
9792-626: 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 made. 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
9894-466: 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. AI facilitated creating inferential information about individuals and groups based on such enormous amounts of collected data, transforming the information economy. The FTC has provided a set of guidelines that represent widely accepted concepts concerning fair information practices in an electronic marketplace, called
9996-520: The use of HTTPS security on all websites is becoming increasingly important regardless of the type of Internet connection being used. Even though metadata about individual pages that a user visits might not be considered sensitive, when aggregated it can reveal a lot about the user and compromise the user's privacy. Deploying HTTPS also allows the use of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (and their predecessors SPDY and QUIC ), which are new HTTP versions designed to reduce page load times, size, and latency. It
10098-516: The use of digital voting machines. The legal protection of the right to privacy in general – and of data privacy in particular – varies greatly around the world. Laws and regulations related to Privacy and Data Protection are constantly changing, it is seen as important to keep abreast of any changes in the law and to continually reassess compliance with data privacy and security regulations. Within academia, Institutional Review Boards function to assure that adequate measures are taken to ensure both
10200-559: The website to retrieve some information from the user's internet, but they usually do not mention what the data being retrieved is. In 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed a regulation that forces websites to visibly disclose to consumers their information privacy practices, referred to as cookie notices. This was issued to give consumers the choice of what information about their behavior they consent to letting websites track; however, its effectiveness
10302-481: Was historically an expensive operation, which meant fully authenticated HTTPS connections were usually found only on secured payment transaction services and other secured corporate information systems on the World Wide Web . In 2016, a campaign by the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the support of web browser developers led to the protocol becoming more prevalent. HTTPS is now used more often by web users than
10404-456: Was presented at the 2009 Blackhat Conference . This type of attack defeats the security provided by HTTPS by changing the https: link into an http: link, taking advantage of the fact that few Internet users actually type "https" into their browser interface: they get to a secure site by clicking on a link, and thus are fooled into thinking that they are using HTTPS when in fact they are using HTTP. The attacker then communicates in clear with
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