Защита конфиденциальности потребителей: вызовы и решения.

Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services. A variety of social, legal and political issues arise from the interaction of the public's potential expectation of privacy and the collection and dissemination of data by businesses or merchants. Consumer privacy concerns date back to the first commercial couriers and bankers who enforced strong measures to protect customer privacy. In modern times, the ethical codes of various professions specify measures to protect customer privacy, including medical privacy and client confidentiality. State interests include matters of national security. Consumer concerned about the invasion of individual information, thus doubtful when thinking about using certain services. Many organizations have a competitive incentive to collect, retain, and use customer data for various purposes, and many companies adopt security engineering measures to control this data and manage customer expectations and legal requirements for consumer privacy. Consumer privacy protection is the use of laws and regulations to protect individuals from privacy loss due to the failures and limitations of corporate customer privacy measures. Corporations may be inclined to share data for commercial advantage and fail to officially recognize it as sensitive to avoid legal liability in the chance that lapses of security may occur. Modern consumer privacy law originated from telecom regulation when it was recognized that a telephone company had access to unprecedented levels of information. Customer privacy measures were seen as deficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, employee turnover, and theft of data storage devices (e. g., hard drives) that could store a large amount of data in a portable location. Businesses have consumer data and information obtained from consumer and client purchases, products, and services. Thus, businesses have the responsibility to keep these data and information safe and confidential. Consumers expect that businesses will take an active stance when protecting consumer privacy issues and supporting confidential agreements. Whether a firm provides services or products to consumers, firms are expected to use methods such as obfuscation or encoding methods to cover up consumer data when analyzing data or trends for example. Firms are also expected to protect consumer privacy both within the organizations themselves and from outside third entities including third party providers of services, suppliers who provide product components and supplies, and government institutions or community partnership organizations. In addition, businesses are sometime required to provide an agreement/contract to service clients or product consumer that states customer or client information and data will be kept confidential and that it will not be used for advertising or promotional purposes for example. The US government, including the FTC, have consumer protection laws like The Telephone Consumer Protection Act and Data Transparency and Privacy Act. Individuals States have laws and regulation that protect consumers as well. One example of this is The California Consumer Privacy Act.

Through the 1970s, many other organizations in developed nations began to acquire sensitive data, but there were few or no regulations in place to prevent them from sharing or abusing the data. Customer trust and goodwill were generally thought to be sufficient in first world countries, notably the United States, to ensure the protection of truly sensitive data; caveat emptor was applied in these situations. But in the 1980s, smaller organizations also began to get access to computer hardware and software, and these simply did not have the procedures or personnel or expertise, nor less the time, to take rigorous measures to protect their customers. Meanwhile, via target marketing and rewards programs, companies were acquiring ever more data. Gradually, customer privacy measures were seen as deficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, employee turnover, and theft of data storage devices (e. g. hard drives) that could store a large amount of data in a portable location. Explicit regulation of consumer privacy gained further support, especially in the European Union, where each nation had laws that were incompatible (e. g., some restricted the data collection, the data compilation and the data dissemination); it was possible to violate privacy within the EU simply doing these things from different places in the European Common Market as it existed before 1992.

Through the 1990s, the proliferation of mobile telecom, the introduction of customer relationship management, and the use of the Internet in developed nations brought the situation to the forefront, and most countries had to implement strong consumer privacy laws, often over the objections of business. The European Union and New Zealand passed particularly strong laws that were used as a template for more limited laws in Australia and Canada and some states of the United States (where no federal law for consumer privacy exists, although there are requirements specific to banking and telecom privacy). In Austria around the 1990s, the mere mention of a client's name in a semi public social setting was enough to earn a junior bank executive a stiff jail sentence.

After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, privacy took a back seat to national security in legislators' minds. Accordingly, concerns of consumer privacy in the United States have tended to go unheard of as questions of citizen privacy versus the state, and the development of a police state or carceral state, have occupied advocates of strong privacy measures. Whereas it may have appeared prior to 2002 that commercial organizations and the consumer data they gathered were of primary concern, it has appeared since then in most developed nations to be much less of a concern than political privacy and medical privacy (e. g., as violated by biometrics). Indeed, people have recently been stopped at airports solely due to their political views, and there appears to be minimal public will to stop practices of this nature. The need for stricter laws is more pronounced after the American web service provider, Yahoo admitted that sensitive information (including email addresses and passwords) of half a billion users was stolen by hackers in 2014. The data breach was a massive setback for the company and raised several questions about the revelation of the news after two years of the hacking incident.