Privacy and Confidentiality

The scope of privacy and confidentiality is large.  They cover property, embarrassing events, salary, bank account, marriage status, sexual activity, financial performance, health condition and so forth. New media make our life convenient; it also increases privacy and confidentiality invasions.

People can use their cell phones, digital cameras, and video cameras to take picture or record anything interest them.  The thing can be someone does something embarrassing. Without the person’s permission, people who record or take pictures can post it online. The video or picture can be viewed by people in world wide. People may criticize the person, laugh at the person, and leave comments. The person in the picture or video loses privacy.

  The monitoring of work issue is all over work place now .We use computers to complete our tasks. Employers may monitor employees’ email and performance by detecting the computers. Employer argues that the monitoring is for ensuring employees’ obligations to the company; but employees argue that the monitoring is violating their privacy known as personal knowledge.

Consumer privacy is also a big issue. The sellers own our information in online database when we purchase things online.  They usually use the information for legal business purposes, such as mailing the product, billing, and other customer services. However, sellers may also use our private information for some illegal purposes, such as disclosing customer’s information, and selling the information to other companies.  The information includes consumers’ address, phone number, social security number and so forth. If there is no protection to the privacy of information by company; consumer may receive junk mail, disrupting phone call, theft of identity, and so forth. Also, such purchasing online activity may make customer lose identity and credit card account information when they get hacking by others.

The privacy of essential body knowledge, it means the knowledge of the professions .In an organization, there are different kind of professions perform different jobs in different departments. There may have competition between departments, and inaccessible information between them. If the knowledge or information is accessed by unauthorized people, there would be fraud, manipulation, stealing of information for their personal interests. Such actions can be done by virus, hacking, and worm.  The privacy of profession is not only necessary for the professions to keep their security roles, data, and knowledge; but also necessary for eliminating illegal actions in the organization.