Customer privacy

Consumer privacy is a form of information privacy concerned with the relationship between business or merchant collection and dissemination of data and the public expectation of privacy, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. 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 most professions very clearly specify privacy measures beyond that for the consumer of any service, including medical privacy, client confidentiality, and national security. Since most organizations have a strong competitive incentive to retain an exclusive access to these data, and since customer trust is usually a high priority, most companies take some security engineering measures to protect customer 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.

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. In modern times, the ethical codes of most professions specify privacy measures for the consumer of any service, including medical privacy, client confidentiality, and national security. These codes are particularly important in a carceral state, where no privacy in any form nor limits on state oversight or data use exists.

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Wikipedia