Privacy, Regulations, and Cybersecurity

CHAPTER 4Introduction to Regulations

If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

—John Maynard Keynes

Now that we have a sense of what privacy is and how we narrowly apply it to our world of data, let's see what legislators have come up with to address it.

Our approach will be limited in scope. We are only interested in privacy regulations that are specific to our data at rest (data storage), in motion (data transfer), and during data processing. Bodily and territorial privacy, while critical topics requiring your attention as a world citizen, are beyond the scope of this book.

As always, we will start with a definition! What does the term regulation mean? My favorite definition comes from our perennial friends at Merriam-Webster:

Regulation (noun)

1. The act of regulating: the state of being regulated
2. a: an authoritative rule dealing with details or procedure

   b: a rule or order issued by an executive authority or regulatory agency of a government and having the force of law

Across the world, the “executive authority or regulatory agency” described above has been either legislative bodies, governmental agencies, or various flavors of decrees coming from some supreme leader or another.

Of course, there are other ways to define ...