IT systems must be designed with privacy in mind

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Privacy needs to be designed into IT systems, and real security doesn’t exist if it isn’t built in, according to an EU data protection expert.

EU supervisor for European data protection Peter Hustinx said that there must be a bridge between privacy, IT support and infrastructure.

Hustinx said that in previous years the conclusion was that data protection laws were “technology resistant”.

With new technology such as RFID tagging, data protection laws need to become more “specific”, with the European Commission coming up with new recommendations to make sure that existing privacy principles work well that environment.

Law and legal principles were interacting with technology, and that privacy and trust were vital in a networked world, according to Hustinx.

He added that some of the security measures now being put in place were obviously making an impact on privacy, and that it was necessary to draw a careful balance.

“[Privacy and trust] will become ever more relevant, given the fact that in the last 10 years we have been dealing with additional security challenges which were often leading with public security but also increasingly with information security,” he said.

“The most published incidents are perhaps in the UK, where statistics have shown more than three of four hundred serious incidents per year. That is an impressive figure," he said of recent data breach incidents.

“It’s the public sector, the private sector, the health sector, commercial, non-commercial – it seems to be a structural problem.”

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