ve made possible new kinds of information; 3) they have made possible a new scale of information distribution; 4) the effect of erroneous information can be magnified; and 5) information about events in one's life may remain on one's record for life (Johnson 87).
Probably the first concern raised in terms of the concern for information privacy in the computer age was that the government would be the entity to commit a breach of privacy, and it is true that the government today has far more information on each citizen than it ever had in the past and could have access to far more in various private computer systems across the country. In the past, most governmental decisions concerning individual citizens in such areas as taxes, law enforcement, student loans, and social Security benefits were based on personal knowledge of the citizen involved and upon limited information obtained from families, friends, and associates. When such information was kept it was kept in manual fil
...