Privacy Protection and Data Breaches

Data breach is the act of accessing a central data repository without the consent of the data owner. Data breaches are occurring frequently and involve millions of records. Major breaches have been reported since 2005. Often data breaches occur due to someone with malicious intent accessing the stored data. In this paper we look at the types of data breaches and how they impact people’s privacy, we introduce a data protection model with the goal of protecting people’s privacy. Given today’s mobile information needs it is essential to have access to personal data. Social networks are making it difficult to keep personal information private. We provide several different summaries to show the effect of data breaches and data losses on people. We conclude this paper with a set of recommendations to protect people’s privacy.