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Customer Relationship Management

Notes 3. When Privacy protects anti-social behaviour, such a situation proves to be a
…………………… in privacy system or policies of the respective countries.
4. Currently, in India there is …………………… legislation for protecting the privacy of
individuals for all information that may be available with private entities.
5. Sub-sections …………………… exempts disclosure of personal information in various
circumstances.

12.2 Privacy – A Global Approach

In Europe, advances in data processing led in the 1970s to fears about the abuse of information
storage and the potential for a “1984”-like surveillance state. Many of these fears were based on
the technological notion of computers as vast centralized mainframes, a notion which
corresponded to the state of computer technology of the 1960s. But since then, this technology
has moved steadily toward a decentralized system, with millions of small computers in people’s
offices and homes.

Though the origin of concern over privacy was the potential violent abuse of data by government
agencies, the focus of remedial action shifted quickly to data collection activities by private
business. Rules against the government’s collection of data were also set, but with less severity.
At the same time that Germany promulgated the first data protection laws against private data
abuse, its federal and state governments took a quantum leap in the use of data-processing
technology for the surveillance of its citizenry. During the 1970s, a handful of terrorists prompted
the German police to institute a chillingly efficient system of border checks, citizen registration,
data access, and domestic road blocks, all of which were interconnected by data banks and
communication links. Although the terrorism was quickly stopped, many control mechanisms
were not.
Additionally, the rules had a tendency to spread. A loophole was soon recognized in privacy
laws: international data transfers permitted the evasion of data protection laws. In Sweden, for
example, a data file on any employee is subject to protection from disclosure to third persons.
However, if a Swede works for a foreign firm, it would be possible that the data would be
transmitted to the headquarters of the firm, where it would be less protected. Conceivably,
therefore, some countries could set themselves up as “data havens” in order to attract businesses
determined to circumvent privacy laws. Although these threats were more theoretical than real,
they led to a movement to “harmonize” data protection practices or to restrict the flow of
sensitive data in the absence of such harmonization.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was instrumental. In
1979, the OECD drafted a first set of guidelines for its member states: Data collection should be
limited to necessary information obtained lawfully, and, where appropriate, with consent; data
should be accurate, complete, up-to-date, and relevant to the needs of the collector; use of the
data ought to be specified at the time of collection, and its disclosure should be in conformity
with the purpose of collection; assurances must be made against unauthorized access, use, and
disclosure; and data should be open to inspection and correction by the individual to whom it
refers.

The Council of Europe incorporated the OECD guidelines in the 1980 Convention on the Protection
of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data. The convention affected
all transborder data flows among European countries and with other countries, such as the
United States. This made American firms with international business activities nervous, since
the convention provided that any country could restrict the transmission of data to another
country that did not have data protection legislation comparable to its own. Since firms conducting
international transactions generally prefer to have uniform procedures for transactions in various
countries, procedures were likely to conform to the strictest of national rules.

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