Toward a Universal and Sustainable Privacy Protection Framework

Abstract

An enormous amount of user data is generated and collected each day with the emergence and utilization of technologies. Unsurprisingly, privacy matters remain one of the top concerns for data owners, businesses, and authorities. As such, nations worldwide continue to issue new privacy regulations or amend existing ones to stay relevant in an increasingly digitalized world. With the different privacy laws and globalization considerations, it can be challenging for organizations to be compliant to all of them. Hence, we aim to address this challenge by building a more universal set of privacy principles to strive toward greater and common understanding of privacy notions and enhance the ease of compliance. Our contribution in the article is a proposed three-stage methodology to identify the key global privacy principles, analyze the impacts of these privacy principles onto various stakeholders, and identify any potential privacy gaps. We also propose some suggestions to address the privacy gaps. Last, we discuss the future directions of this area.