2. Consumer privacy, also known as customer privacy, involves the handling and protection of sensitive personal information that individuals provide in the course of everyday business transactions.
This involves the exchange or use of data electronically or by any other means, including telephone, fax, written correspondence, and even direct word of mouth.
Gradually, customer privacy measures alone have proven to be insufficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, employee turnover, theft of hard drives, or other data-carrying hardware from job locations.
With the advent and evolution of the internet and other electronic methods of mass communications, consumer privacy has become a major issue.
Personal information, when misused or inadequately protected, can result in identity theft, financial fraud, and other problems that collectively cost people around the world, businesses, and governments great financial losses each year.