Key topics: Data Protection Act, Privacy, Information commissioner, Personnel records. What is meant by data protection? Why is it important? What does it mean to an employee?

"This book looks at the way information and data is collected and used by individuals, governments, companies, and organizations. Arguments for both increased security and increased privacy are offered, encouraging readers to think critically about the issues. Topics relevant to children are included, such as being tracked at school, cyberbullying, and online safety."--

"In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore. But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government....

An FBI futurist and senior advisor to Interpol analyzes the digital underground to reveal the alarming ways criminals, corporations and countries are using emerging technologies to target individuals and wage war.

We have a global privacy problem. The average person provides more information about themselves to more outsiders than any time in history. Corporations, governments and even our neighbors can know where we are at times, can quickly learn our preferences and priorities and see who we meet. The past decade has brought deep changes in the collection of our private information, the regulation of that collection, and in people's sensitivity to loss of...

"The threats to privacy are well known: the National Security Agency tracks our phone calls; Google records where we go online and how we set our thermostats; Facebook changes our privacy settings when it wishes; Target gets hacked and loses control of our credit card information; our medical records are available for sale to strangers; our children are fingerprinted and their every test score saved for posterity; and small robots patrol our schoolyards...