Information Privacy: Issues, Concerns and Strategies

The twenty-first century globalized world is characterized by an explosive and exponential growth of data and information that is generated from diverse heterogeneous sources and stored in various formats about all kinds of human endeavour for use in decision making and policy formulation. With this phenomenal growth in information comes with it privacy concerns which have legal implications. This research seeks to comprehensively review critical issues in information privacy, defining key terms like Information, Privacy, Personally Identifiable Information and Expectation of Privacy, this paper will also examine types of personally identifiable information that come under privacy concerns, privacy on the internet, categories of technology to address privacy protection in commercial information technology systems such as: P3P, and XACML. Privacy-enhancing technologies, privacy and the internet, areas of privacy, data and privacy laws of Nigeria and other countries and industry-standard information security requirements and frameworks like the Sarbanes-Oxley law (SOX), privacy issues of social networking sites will all be looked into, so as to broaden our knowledge on information privacy issues. Keywords: Information privacy, P3P, XACML, Sarbanes-Oxley law.