Editing Consumer privacy (section)

==History==
===1970s===
Through the 1970s, many other organizations in [[developed nation]]s began to acquire sensitive data, but there were few or no regulations in place to prevent them from sharing or abusing the data.  Customer trust and goodwill were generally thought to be sufficient in first-world countries, notably the [[United States]], to ensure the protection of truly sensitive data;  ''[[caveat emptor]]'' was applied in these situations. But in the 1980s, smaller organizations also began to get access to computer hardware and software, and these simply did not have the procedures or personnel or expertise, nor less the time, to take rigorous measures to protect their customers.  Meanwhile, via [[target marketing]] and [[rewards programs]], companies were acquiring ever more data.{{citation needed|date=July 2019}}<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Foxman, Ellen R., and Paula Kilcoyne|date=March 1, 1993|title=Information Technology, Marketing Practice, and Consumer Privacy: Ethical Issues|journal=Journal of Public Policy & Marketing|volume=12|pages=106–119|doi=10.1177/074391569501200111|s2cid=158361537}}</ref>

Gradually, customer privacy measures were seen as deficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, [[employee turnover]], and theft of data storage devices (e.g. [[hard drives]]) that could store a large amount of data in a portable location. Explicit regulation of consumer privacy gained further support, especially in the [[European Union]], where each nation had laws that were incompatible (e.g., some restricted the [[data collection]], the data compilation and the [[data dissemination]]); it was possible to violate privacy within the EU simply doing these things from different places in the [[European Common Market]] as it existed before 1992.{{citation needed|date=July 2019}}<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Papacharissi, Zizi, and Jan Fernback|title=Online privacy and consumer protection: An analysis of portal privacy statements|journal=Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media}}</ref>

===1990s===
Through the 1990s, the proliferation of [[mobile telecom]], the introduction of [[customer relationship management]], and the use of the [[Internet]] in [[developed nation]]s brought the situation to the forefront, and most countries had to implement strong consumer privacy laws, often over the objections of business. The [[European Union]] and [[New Zealand]] passed particularly strong laws that were used as a template for more limited laws in [[Australia]] and [[Canada]] and some states of the [[United States]] (where no federal law for consumer privacy exists, although there are requirements specific to banking and telecom privacy). In [[Austria]] around the 1990s, the mere mention of a client's name in a semi-public social setting was enough to earn a junior bank executive a stiff jail sentence.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2016-06-22|title=Consumer Privacy: Meaning, Principles and Example|url=https://www.businessmanagementideas.com/crm/consumer-privacy-meaning-principles-and-example/3662|access-date=2020-12-06|website=Essays, Research Papers and Articles on Business Management|language=en-US}}</ref>

===2000s===
After the [[September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks|terrorist attacks]] against the [[United States]] on [[September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks|September 11, 2001]], privacy took a back-seat to [[national security]] in legislators' minds.  Accordingly, concerns of consumer privacy in the [[United States]] have tended to go unheard of as questions of citizen privacy versus the state, and the development of a [[police state]] or [[carceral state]], have occupied advocates of strong privacy measures. Whereas it may have appeared prior to 2002 that commercial organizations and the consumer data they gathered were of primary concern, it has appeared since then in most [[developed nation]]s to be much less of a concern than [[political privacy]] and [[medical privacy]] (e.g., as violated by [[biometrics]]).  Indeed, people have recently been [[No Fly List|stopped at airports]] solely due to their political views, and there appears to be minimal public will to stop practices of this nature.{{citation needed|date=July 2019}} The need for stricter laws is more pronounced after the American web service provider, Yahoo admitted that sensitive information (including email addresses and passwords) of half a billion users was stolen by hackers in 2014. The data breach was a massive setback for the company and raised several questions about the revelation of the news after two years of the hacking incident.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/23/yahoo-questinos-hack-researchers|title=Yahoo faces questions after hack of half a billion accounts|date=23 September 2016|work=The Guardian}}</ref>