Privacy: Definition, Best Practices, and Importance in Government IT Systems

What is Privacy?

What Is Privacy? Is It a Right? An Expectation? Discuss Differing Definitions, e.g. "The Average Person" Definition Vs. a Legal Definition, And How These Differences Impact Risk Assessments For Privacy Protections (Or The Lack Thereof).

What Are Some Important Best Practices For Protecting Privacy For Information Collected, Stored, Used, And Transferred By The Us Federal Government? Identify And Discuss Three Or More Best Practice Recommendations For Reducing Risk By Improving Or Ensuring The Privacy Of Information Processed By Or Stored In An Organization’s It Systems And Databases.

Explain Why Federal Government Agencies And Departments Required To Complete Pia's. Should Every Federal It System Have a Pia? Why Or Why Not?

Name And Briefly Describe 3 Benefits To Citizens Which Result From The Use Of Pia's. (Considering Citizen's Needs For Privacy And The Protection Of The Privacy Of Individuals Whose Information Is Collected, Processed, Transmitted, And Stored In Federal Government It Systems And Databases.)

Privacy is defined as the ability of group or an individual to secure themselves from diverse categories of threats or risks. Most of the time the sensitive data and assets are comprised if necessary steps are not taken to deal with the privacy issues.  

There are lots of expectations related with privacy and each of them are very much useful to define the scope of applicability of the privacy protection laws. The expectations of privacy can be categorized into subjective expectation of privacy and objective expectation of privacy (Merrick & Ryan, 2019). The subjective expectations deals with the individual opinion whereas the objective expectations deals with the expectations from the society.

Considering the average person definition of privacy it can be said that it is one of the individual legal rights and is helpful to deal with issues like unwanted publicity and it is also considered as one of the most significant fundamental rights of human beings.

Considering the legal definition of privacy it can be said that it is the individual lethal rights and the term privacy changes according to its legal context (Morgan, 2016). It is one of the most significant fundamental decisions which are related with the personal matter and it is very much significant due to the interventions coming from different regulations, government coercion, and intimidation.

The notable difference between these two definitions is that the average person definition is very much useful to deal with factors like commitment and communication whereas the legal definition is important to deal with factors like organizational structure.

Best Practices for Privacy Protection in US Federal Government IT Systems

The best practices of the US federal government in order to deal with the privacy issues related with the essential information are the US Privacy Act of 1974,  HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and  COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) (Reuben et al., 2016).

The Three Diverse Categories Of Best Practices For Reducing Risks Related With Information Are Discussed As Followings:

Data usage policy: Guidelines are regulations are shared with the users of each computer systems so that the equipment, internet access and network are secured from the privacy issues.

Use of data encryption: The deployment of symmetric and asymmetric encryption can be very much useful to reduce the data security risks coming from the social engineers.  

Use Of Raid On The Server: Raiddisk Drives Is Very Much Useful To Enhance The Performance Of The Data Storage Devices.

There are diverse categories of data which comes in and out from both the government agencies as well as from its department. At the same time, it can also be said that the success as well as the failure of the government depends upon the protection of those data. Any sort of privacy issues with the data can have a huge impact on the productivity of the government and the national economy (Edemekong & Haydel, 2019). Thus, it can be said that the Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) must be completed as it not only help to deal with the privacy issues but is also very much useful to manage the business strategies, policies and business relationships with the other subsidiary organizations.  

Every federal IT system must be having PIA. There are numerous privacy issues related with the IT systems in terms of the computer viruses and Trojan horse, each of these issues can be successfully resolved or reduced with the help of PIA.

The Three Different Benefits To Citizens As a Result Of Using Privacy Impact Assessments (Pia) Are As Followings:

Deal with the privacy risks: There are diverse categories of computer systems which are used by the citizens and there were privacy issues in each of those systems (Alshammari & Simpson, 2018). The use of PIA can be very much useful to deal with these privacy issues from the point of view of the security consultants.

Governance structure: There are numerous issues related with the involvement of the contractors in most of the government projects in terms of addressing the expectations of the consumers. The incorporation of PIA can be very much useful to maintain a good relation with the third party contractors of the government projects.

 Managing personal information: There are data security threatscoming from the employees of a commercial organization as well (Ahmadian et al., 2018). The incorporation of PIA can be very much useful for the strategic planners of commercial business organizations to maintain the security of the organizational data and the employee data. Any change in the business process of a commercial organization can be supported with the help of PIA.

References

Ahmadian, A. S., Strüber, D., Riediger, V., & Jürjens, J. (2018, April). Supporting privacy impact assessment by model-based privacy analysis. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1467-1474). ACM.

Alshammari, M., & Simpson, A. (2018, September). Towards an Effective Privacy Impact and Risk Assessment Methodology: Risk Assessment. In International Conference on Trust and Privacy in Digital Business (pp. 85-99). Springer, Cham.

Edemekong, P. F., & Haydel, M. J. (2019). Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). In StatPearls [Internet]. StatPearls Publishing.

Merrick, R., & Ryan, S. (2019). Data Privacy Governance In The Age Of Gdpr. Risk Management, 66(3), 38-43.

Morgan, M. (2016). Reconsidering the Legal Definition of Privacy. Brigham Young University Prelaw Review, 30(1), 8.

Reuben, J., Martucci, L. A., Fischer-Hübner, S., Packer, H. S., Hedbom, H., & Moreau, L. (2016, August). Privacy Impact Assessment Template for Provenance. In 2016 11th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES) (pp. 653-660). IEEE.