What is the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse? The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse is a nonprofit Corporation with a 501 (c) (3) tax exempt status. It is based in the state of California. Their objective is to protect the privacy of individuals by connecting, educating and empowering them.
What are the five goals of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse?
 Boost consumer’s awareness of how technology affects personal privacy.
 Educates consumers by providing tips on how to better protect their personal information
 Take action on privacy-related complaints or refer them to other organizations for further assistance.
 Records a description of consumer’s complaints and questions regarding privacy that will be available to a variety of individuals.
 Defend consumer’s privacy rights in local, state and Federal proceedings, hearings, testimonies and workshops.
Scroll up the page, and select the link Fact Sheets at the left and scroll down the list to the article entitled Responsible Information-Handling (#12). Open this link, read through the article, and then answer the following questions:
1. Privacy Rights https://www.privacyrights.org/
Question 1: What are some of the methods that businesses should use to protect the privacy rights of their customers and employees? The Privacy Clearinghouse Fact sheet states that an organization should create privacy policies to guide customer and client relations. Employees should have extensive trainings on company privacy policies, collection of data that is only necessary to conduct business to ensure client information is correct and having common sense security practices.
Companies should conduct background checks to select which employees will be qualified to handle sensitive information. Encryption of all data files. Prohibit from recoding full social security numbers (SSNs), only using the last four digits. Dispose of files and records properly. Management status, held accountable for monitoring staff and complying with its privacy policies.
Question 2: How can businesses better protect their data, whether in paper or electronic form? Businesses can better protect their data by encrypting all computers and conducting electronic monitoring. Additional ways to protect their data is by records retention and disposal of hard copies and electronic files. Further, they should research and investigate outside vendors that are responsible for handling company sensitive information to ensure that their company files are safe and secure.
Question 3: How secure do you think e-mail and voice mail systems are? I do not think that email nor voicemail systems are really secure. It seems that everything that we do these days are being monitored and recorded for security reasons. Have your e-mail or voice mail messages ever been intercepted by someone other than the