Privacy and Computerized Data Bases

IASSIST Quarterly In the United States, privacy legislation generally has been limited to government records at the different levels of government, i.e., Federal, state and local. These laws impose requirements and restrictions on how government agencies collect, maintain and use information about individual persons. The United States, with few exceptions, has not adopted legislation to regulate and restrict the collection, maintenance or use of personally identifiable information by non-governmental entities. In other countries, this type of legislation is frequently referred to as “data protection laws.” However, if a threat to the personal privacy exists today in the United States, it comes not from the regulated governmental data bases but from the non-regulated ones outside of government buildings.