Data protection, data privacy, and information privacy are all terms defined as the process of protecting important data/information from corruption, scam, fraud, loss, or compromise. This includes the relationship between the data collection and technology, the public perception and expectation of privacy, and the political as well as legal roots surrounding that data. Therefore, data protection laws aim to provide a balance between the individual's privacy rights and the proper use of data. Data protection is a concern for individuals and organizations who collect, analyze, store, and transmit data; such data could be written on paper or stored on a computer system or network. Both ways of handling information may be prune to loss, damage, or errors. Documents handled as hardcopies may be copied easily, stolen, lost, destroyed, etc. Therefore, it is very difficult to protect such information available in hardcopy format and, in reality, there is no secure method that would safeguard such documents. One may propose to store them in vaults which are secure and protect documents from humidity, light, and fire; however, many questions would be raised in the process of applying/handling such securing strategy before and after storage. On the other hand, electronic information stored on electronic devices and networks needs to be handled very carefully so that these physical systems and the information stored in them do not fall in the hands of those who may use it in fraud, abuse, scam, etc., in addition to policies which should be in place to secure information during the process of transmission and storage. In this chapter, issues related to data protection laws are discussed.

Chapter Contents:

• 12.1 Introduction
• 12.2 Why data protection policies?
• 12.2.1 Principles of data protection laws
• 12.3 Data classification
• 12.3.1 Types of data classification
• 12.3.2 The data classification process
• 12.4 Global cyberlaws
• 12.4.1 Data protection and privacy legislation
• 12.4.2 Online consumer protection legislation
• 12.4.3 E-transactions legislation
• 12.4.4 Cybercrime legislation
• 12.5 DPLs and social media
• 12.6 The EU general data protection regulation
• 12.7 DPLs and cybersecurity challenges
• 12.8 Data privacy and cybersecurity checklist
• 12.9 Recommendations and future research directions in data privacy
• 12.10 Conclusion
• Acknowledgment
• References

Inspec keywords: storage management; data protection; law; security of data; document handling

Other keywords: data collection; data protection laws; data privacy; information privacy; document handling

Subjects: File organisation; Data security; Document processing and analysis techniques; Legal aspects of computing