Our sensitive personal information is being exposed to a vast range of other parties as a result of interacting technical developments. Our ability to control who have access to which information about us is declining rapidly. Unfortunately, there has been very little public discussion about protecting personal information, particularly protecting it from those who do not have our best interests in mind. Increasingly powerful software tools are being employed to mine large information bases and correlate information items to develop dossiers about each individual that can predict behavior to a remarkable degree.
The Excel workbook in the link provides some thinking on the exposure of personal information and the issues that deserve careful public consideration and the development of appropriate policies to protect citizens from harm. The first tab in the workbook is a table describing who should have access to what information. The second tab lists some key privacy policy questions. The third tab describes some identification keys that are commonly used to correlate information about a particular individual. The fourth tab addresses machine processing of collected information to access sensitive personal data.