Privacy Harm and Non-Compliance from a Legal Perspective

Abstract

In today\u27s data-sharing paradigm, personal data has become a valuable resource that intensifies the risk of unauthorized access and data breach. Increased data mining techniques used to analyze big data have posed significant risks to data security and privacy. Consequently, data breaches are a significant threat to individual privacy. Privacy is a multifaceted concept covering many areas, including the right to access, erasure, and rectify personal data. This paper explores the legal aspects of privacy harm and how they transform into legal action. Privacy harm is the negative impact to an individual as a result of the unauthorized release, gathering, distillation, or expropriation of personal information. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) emerged as a solution to address data privacy issues and minimize the risk of privacy harm. It is essential to implement privacy enhancement mechanisms to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII) from unlawful use or access. FIPPs (Fair Information Practice Principles), based on the 1973 Code of Fair Information Practice (CFIP), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), are a collection of widely accepted, influential US codes that agencies use when evaluating information systems, processes, programs, and activities affecting individual privacy. Regulatory compliance places a responsibility on organizations to follow best practices to ensure the protection of individual data privacy rights. This paper will focus on FIPPs, relevance to US state privacy laws, their influence on OECD, and reference to the EU General Data Processing Regulation. (GDPR). Keywords —Privacy harm, Privacy Enhancing Technologies(PETs),Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs