What is Data Privacy?

Data privacy refers to the privacy concerns that arise from how the information of data subjects from various sources, including personal connected devices, is collected, stored, combined, used, processed, shared, and disclosed across multiple platforms. More than 120 countries have laws laying down rules on the protection of personal data. As the number of privacy laws continues to multiply, there has been an increased consumer awareness on data privacy. 

Various studies indicate that consumers worldwide are increasingly becoming concerned about why organizations collect their personal data, whether or not their personal data is shared with third parties, which parties have access to their personal data, their rights in connection to their personal data, and overall, how their personal data is handled.

• According to the Internet society, 63% of the global consumer population (sampled from the US, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, and the UK) is concerned about the data being collected about them and 75% distrust how organizations use and share their data. 
• A global study conducted by Kaspersky found that around 74%t of Brazilian internet users have tried to remove their personal data from websites and social media. 
• According to Statista, there have been 4,395 data breaches in the US from 2017 to 2019, resulting in over 832 million compromised records. 
• According to IBM, the average cost of responding to a data breach incident for US companies has risen to $8.19 million per incident.

Given the increasing rise of data privacy concerns, most privacy laws aim to protect the confidentiality and security of an individual’s personal data. Before we look into some of the significant modern privacy laws, it is important to understand what constitutes personal and sensitive personal data, the key data protection principles and how organizations should approach data privacy.