As this research study will discuss and analyse different issues raised from this topic in regard to personal information security along with information privacy perspective with all implication that cyber criminality has over personal information by being exploited by external entities with malicious purposes. It evaluates the current security implementation, find the gap in previous literature and propose the best methodology to handle personal information for the public interest. Therefore, the most relevant studies prior to this literature will be presented.
Since decades the view about transaction of information through web have been traditionally considered that organization, business and consumers as transacting parties. Security and privacy issue in personal information have been explored in terms of marketing and the major component discovered in the studies that build a relationship between individual and organisation is the amount of trust between client and the vendor (Anderson & Agarwal, 2010). Some studies stipulate that the disclosure of personal information may be influenced by organisation that provide services to individual while other research dispute that trust depend with the level of personalisation provided by the organisation. However, this raise a security concern between individual and organization due to amount of information that individual is required to provide to the organisation. The study shows that actors such as retailers, customers and suppliers contribute to the transaction of information using what is considered the major actor for online transaction which is known as computer system for processing all data over the internet (Rapp, Beitelspacher, Grewal, & Hughes , 2013). According to Australian privacy act 1988 in privacy right section and personal information page (OAIC, n.d.) the law state that any organisation or agency that handle personal information need individual consent to collect and to use or disclose your personal information. With all the transactions on personal information within organisations, information theft and data loss has increase on a global scale and malicious organisation such as hackers and activist emphasise on illegally access and steal data accumulated by venders and provider.
Personal information handling and disclosure are the major area of concerns due to the interconnection between individual and organisation. (Posey, Lowry, Roberts, & Ellis , 2010) argue that the influence from social perspective and online trust has developed a privacy risk when it comes to disclosure of information on the other hand the literature show that it is more important using platforms or organisation that has ability to remain anonymous while serving the purpose as this reduce the privacy concerns.
The dispute in literatures have been around organisation collecting individual’s personal information, store that information and process them in accordance to the usage which could be defined in various way such as for marketing purpose, finance record, health record. In particular some issues raised in using these organisation platforms including data mining, user surveillance, usage of facial recognition for tracking client presence, employing cookies to track individual activities, GPS tracking to track user location. The research show that individual never have intention of disclosing their personal information but are influenced by the power that organisations have over their information.
This study will highlight some important concerns that organisation need to take into account in order to preserve individual personal information and for better managing them.
- For every organisation that process personal information, it is important to classify all individual’s information in accordance to it sensitivity and use them accordingly.
- Due diligence should be considered when organisation want to share personal information with others example Banks sharing with credit score compagnies. This is for preserving customer reputation and preventing cyber crime over individual. (Gressin, 2017) Shows that if you have a credit report you have a probability to be among the 143 million American consumers whose sensitive information have been exposed into the Equifax data breach.
- It is of high importance to get individual consent about disclosing their personal information and when their information needs to be used refer to the Australian Privacy act on responsibilities that each party has over individual data (OAIC, n.d.)
- To keep personal information privacy and secure, it very important for organisation to employ the best technical practices to ensure individual data is highly secured.