Consumer privacy

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Consumer privacy is information privacy as it relates to the consumers of products and services.

A variety of social, legal and political issues arise from the interaction of the public's potential expectation of privacy and the collection and dissemination of data by businesses or merchants.^[1] Consumer privacy concerns date back to the first commercial couriers and bankers who enforced strong measures to protect customer privacy. In modern times, the ethical codes of various professions specify measures to protect customer privacy, including medical privacy and client confidentiality. State interests include matters of national security. Consumer concerned about the invasion of individual information, thus doubtful when thinking about using certain services.^[2] Many organizations have a competitive incentive to collect, retain, and use customer data for various purposes, and many companies adopt security engineering measures to control this data and manage customer expectations and legal requirements for consumer privacy.

Consumer privacy protection is the use of laws and regulations to protect individuals from privacy loss due to the failures and limitations of corporate customer privacy measures. Corporations may be inclined to share data for commercial advantage and fail to officially recognize it as sensitive to avoid legal liability in the chance that lapses of security may occur. Modern consumer privacy law originated from telecom regulation when it was recognized that a telephone company had access to unprecedented levels of information. 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.

Businesses have consumer data and information obtained from consumer and client purchases, products, and services. Thus, businesses have the responsibility to keep these data and information safe and confidential. Consumers expect that businesses will take an active stance when protecting consumer privacy issues and supporting confidential agreements.^{[3][citation needed]} Whether a firm provides services or products to consumers, firms are expected to use methods such as obfuscation or encoding methods to cover up consumer data when analyzing data or trends for example. Firms are also expected to protect consumer privacy both within the organizations themselves and from outside third entities including third party providers of services, suppliers who provide product components and supplies, and government institutions or community partnership organizations. In addition, businesses are sometime required to provide an agreement/contract to service clients or product consumer that states customer or client information and data will be kept confidential and that it will not be used for advertising or promotional purposes for example. The US government, including the FTC, have consumer protection laws like The Telephone Consumer Protection Act and Data Transparency and Privacy Act. Individuals States have laws and regulation that protect consumers as well. One example of this is The California Consumer Privacy Act.