Information Privacy

Integrated Answer to Question 3:

What are possible consequences of sharing personal information with third parties and what legal mechanisms exist to protect information owners?

Due to the ongoing globalization more and more countries are becoming uniform in ways business is conducted on their territory. This uniformity includes marketing strategies and subsequently the types of personal information that is collected and combined. The US, the Netherlands and Hong Kong are among the biggest players in the global market, which makes the residents of these states experience similar consequences when their personal information becomes someone else’s asset. However, despite these similarities, there are certain differences in the legal mechanisms of protecting information owners that exist in these countries (please note that we are not including the country of China, of which Hong Kong is a part, for the reason that this city has a high degree of autonomy). In this part of the chapter we will address both of these issues.

There is a common belief that combining personal information only leads to negative consequences. Although the people’s concerns are well-grounded, it is not necessarily the case. As a matter of fact, sharing of this type of information and combining it into large databases can have many potential benefits.

First, such databases can support more efficient, easier to access services (Thomas). For instance, it is a well known fact that banks have databases containing information regarding their customers. These databases essentially include names, addresses and phone numbers. However, in order to efficiently process credit applications and other types of transactions the banks need social security number, credit ratings, assets value, mortgage information if applicable, and also spending habits of the applicants and possibly their criminal records. By integrating this data into one database, the banks can increase their efficiency, namely,...