In general, privacy is the right to be left alone and to be free of unreasonable personal intrusions. Information privacy is the right to determine when, and to what extent, information about you can be gathered and/or communicated to others. Privacy rights apply to individuals, groups, and institutions.

The right to privacy is recognized today in all of India either by statute or in common law.

Privacy can be interpreted quite broadly. However, court decisions in many countries have followed two rules fairly closely:

1. The right to privacy is not absolute. Privacy must be balanced against the needs of society.
2. The public’s right to know supersedes the individual’s right to privacy.

These two rules illustrate why determining and enforcing privacy regulations can be difficult.

Rapid advances in information technologies have made it much easier to collect, store, and integrate vast amounts of data on individuals in large databases.

On an average day, data about you are generated in many ways: surveillance cameras located on toll roads, on other roadways, in busy intersections, in public places, and at work; credit card transactions; telephone calls (landline and cellular); banking transactions; queries to search engines; and government records (including police records).

These data can be integrated to produce a digital dossier, which is an electronic profile of you and your habits.

The process of forming a digital dossier is called profiling.

Data aggregators, such as LexisNexis (www.lexisnexis.com), ChoicePoint (www.choicepoint .com), and Acxiom (www.acxiom.com), are prominent examples of profilers.

These companies collect public data such as real estate records and published telephone numbers, in addition to nonpublic information such as Social Security numbers; financial data; and police, criminal, and motor vehicle records.

They then integrate these data to form digital dossiers on most adults in the United States. They ultimately sell these dossiers to law enforcement agencies and companies that conduct background checks on potential employees.

They also sell them to companies that want to know their customers better, a process called customer intimacy.