TECHNICAL ASPECTS OF PRIVACY PROTECTION.

Laws now in effect in the United States grant certain privacy rights to individual citizens vis-a-vis federal agencies, state government agencies in several states, and certain organization in the private sector that maintain personal information on them in automated record-keeping systems. Pending are bills to extend privacy protection to the entire private sector. Implementation of privacy protection requirements involves numerous technical considerations that are discussed. Unless these technical aspects and their limitations are taken into account when the privacy protection requirements are legislated, implementation of the requirements may turn out to be technically infeasible or economically unacceptable and, correspondingly, protection provided may be largely illusory.