Consumer privacy
 Personal Data Ecosystem
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Consumer privacy is the use of laws and regulations to protect individuals from privacy loss due to the failures and limitations of corporate customer privacy measures. The damage done by privacy loss is not measurable, nor can it be undone, and commercial organizations have little or no interest in taking unprofitable measures to drastically increase privacy of customers. 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.
Consumer privacy concerns date back to the first commercial couriers and bankers who enforced strong measures to protect customer privacy. Harsh punitive measures were passed as the result of failing to keep a customer's information private. Compared to the Hippocratic Oath- which includes a requirement for doctors to avoid mentioning the ills of patients to others, not only to protect them, but to protect their families - modern consumer privacy law and regulation runs along the same theme. It also recognizes that innocent third parties can be harmed by the loss of control of sensitive personal information. Today, the ethical codes of most professions very clearly specify privacy measures beyond that for the 'consumer' of any service. Those measures are discussed in other articles on medical privacy, client confidentiality and national security - and to a degree in carceral state (where no privacy in any form nor limits on state oversight or data use exist).
Modern consumer privacy law originated from telecom regulation when it was recognized that a telephone company, especially a monopoly (known in most nations as a PTT), had access to unprecedented levels of information: the direct customer's communication habits and correspondents and the data of those who shared his or her household. Telephone operators could frequently hear conversations, inadvertently or deliberately, and there job required them to dial the exact numbers.
The data gathering required for the process of billing began to become a privacy risk as well. Accordingly, strong rules on operator behavior, customer confidentiality, records keeping and destruction were enforced on telephone companies in every country. Typically only police and military authorities had legal powers to 'wiretap' or see records. Even stricter requirements emerged for various banks' electronic records - in some countries, financial privacy is a major focus of the economy and penalties for violating it are severe and criminal penalties applied.
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Wikipedia