rubric of what is commonly referred to as the right of privacy for centuries. Such safeguards have not always satisfied the concerns of the aggrieved individual, but they do afford some measures of protection. More recently there has been a recognition that such rights require a more specific means of protection, and one of the reasons for this has been the possibility for intrusion into the privacy of the individual as a result of advances in technology, specifically the development of computers. Our daily activities have felt the impact of the development of the computer.
Freedman (1982) cites the work of the Privacy Protection Study Commission which found that there was an imbalance in the relationship between individuals and record-keeping organizations. The commission recommended three objectives to ensure effective privacy protection: 1) minimizing intrusiveness by balancing what an individual is expected to divulge and what he or she seeks in return; 2) maximizing fairness by delineating the nature and extent of record-keeping operations; and 3) creating legitimate and enforceable expectations of confidentiality by law or statute and by reasonable enforcement procedures.
The Commission also pointed out that there are certain basic legal principles designed to protect individual privacy and individual liberties in any democratic society. First, the individual is entitled by law to have access to personal information held about him or her, including in computerized data banks. The individual is entitled as well to control in a reasonable manner that information which is collected and disseminated about him or her. Second, to guarantee this right to individual privacy, there must be a statute of limitations or time period governing the initial collection of personal information; a delineation of the purposes for which such personal information may be used, and this must be clearly stated at the time of the initial coll...