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This paper considers the effectiveness of the Data Protection Act since its launch in 1984. The National Audit Office prepared a report in 1993, which was critical of the Data Protection Registrar, its implementation of the registration and the eight data protection principles of good practice. These criticisms are discussed here with a view to improving the Registrar's approach to data protection law, and its attitude to those who are required to register under the Data Protection Act.

Medical confidentiality derives from the Hippocratic Oath and has been affirmed in most codes of professional conduct, including the Irish Medical Council's guide to professional conduct and ethics. The Irish Data Protection Act 1988 and Amendment 2003 bring this responsibility into a legal forum. The aim of this audit is to assess how comprehensively medical tutors/consultants instilled knowledge and appreciation of confidentiality and data protection to medical students in a prominent Dublin University Hospital.

Breaches in data protection legislation by final year medical students were identified by means of a questionnaire. Changes were made to the curriculum (presentations, notices on students' e‐learning interface and induction manual) and to the exams in psychiatry, to increase awareness of data protection legislation. Students at the same point in their education were re‐assessed one year later to see if the interventions were helpful in increasing knowledge and improving adherence to data protection legislation.

Significant breaches of the data protection legislation at baseline and follow up were identified. Examples include: “Data shall be kept for one or more specified, explicit and legitimate purposes” – when asked if they would inform patients that assessments were for submission of a case report, 44 per cent at baseline and 56 per cent at follow‐up said yes. “Appropriate security measures shall be taken against unauthorised access” – 52 per cent password‐protected their computer at baseline and 59 per cent did at follow‐up. Of those that had no password protection at baseline, 70 per cent of their computers were used by others, with little change in this at follow‐up (68 per cent). At baseline 52 per cent kept a copy of reports on USB devices compared to 46 per cent at follow‐up. 26 per cent admitted to losing a USB device in the past. “Data should not be kept longer than is necessary for that purpose” – 63 per cent admitting keeping electronic copies of case reports on their computers following submission at baseline and 64 per cent at follow‐up. “Data should be made anonymous” – 96 per cent at baseline and 100 per cent at follow‐up used initials when submitting case reports to make the data anonymous.

What was disappointing was that, while knowledge and awareness of obligations under data protection legislation improved following intervention, breaches in compliance still remained.

This is the first such audit in Ireland on the provision of educational training in the area of data protection legislation to medical students. It is likely that that such breaches by medical students reflect the tip of the iceberg in relation to probable breaches amongst registered healthcare professionals. The challenge now facing the medical profession and healthcare services is to effect behavioural change to improve compliance with data protection legislation.

The study focusses on the legal issues surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), which are being investigated and debated about several European Union initiatives to manage and regulate Information and Communication Technologies. The goal is to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of adopting AI technology and the ramifications for the articulations of law and politics in democratic constitutional countries. Thus, the study aims to identify socio-legal concerns and possible solutions to protect individuals’ interests. The exploratory study is based on statutes, rules, and committee reports. The study has used news pieces, reports issued by organisations and legal websites. The study revealed computer security vulnerabilities, unfairness, bias and discrimination, and legal personhood and intellectual property issues. Issues with privacy and data protection, liability for harm, and lack of accountability will all be discussed. The vulnerability framework is utilised in this chapter to strengthen comprehension of key areas of concern and to motivate risk and impact mitigation solutions to safeguard human welfare. Given the importance of AI’s effects on weak individuals and groups as well as their legal rights, this chapter contributes to the discourse, which is essential. The chapter advances the conversation while appreciating the legal work done in AI and the fact that this sector needs constant review and flexibility. As AI technology advances, new legal challenges, vulnerabilities, and implications for data privacy will inevitably arise, necessitating increased monitoring and research.

Introduction: The insurance industry is vulnerable to attacks as it deals with the personal information of its consumers and puts the insurance company’s business at risk in the event of data breach or abuse. To ensure the security of customer data, insurance companies must comply with various data protection requirements, including requirements imposed by laws, regulations, and standards. Following such a wide range of conditions can be challenging for insurance providers. For a long time, risk management has controlled data protection to ensure compliance with data protection law and ensure that data are processed correctly and that people’s fundamental rights are protected effectively.

Purpose: This chapter explains the role and significance of risk management. An organised way to identify and assess risks, mitigate or avoid risks as much as possible, and then manage and accept the remaining risks, implemented in data protection as needed, explained by the supervisory authority, is implemented by the responsible organisation. This document highlights the growing consensus surrounding risk management as an essential tool for adequate data protection. Furthermore, it addresses vital considerations that affect the role of risk in data protection law and practice.

Need for study: There is an increasing consensus towards the role and significance of risk management in data protection in the insurance market. As a result, regulators and legislators are focussing on valuable and new attention on standardising and expanding data protection in risk management practices. This paper has attempted to identify critical issues and principles of risk management in data protection.

Methodology: Secondary data analysis was conducted in this study by reviewing literature related to data protection, risk management, and the insurance sector. Again, science direct was used as a source of information. For this study, the literature review approach was chosen since it allows us to trace the growth of the subject matter and identify the patterns that have formed through time.

Findings: The insurance industry comprises general insurance and life insurance. It is found that there are various studies conducted on the privacy violation and data breaches of individuals in the insurance industry. The study also identifies the factors causing privacy issues and recommends improving data privacy management in the insurance market.

Practical implications: The current study can be referred to by academicians, marketers, industry people, and policymakers. In addition, the study encourages companies and academicians to investigate further the process of data protection in the insurance industry.

This paper aims to explain how the EU projects its own data protection regime to third states and the US in particular. Digital services have become a central element in the transatlantic economy. A substantial part of that trade is associated with the transfer of data, most of it personal, requiring many of the new products and services emerging to adhere to data protection standards. Yet different conceptions of data protection exist across the Atlantic, with the EU putting a particular focus on protecting the fundamental right to privacy.

Using the distinction between positive and negative forms of market integration as a starting point (Scharpf, 1997), this paper examines the question of how the EU is projecting its own data protection regime to third states. The so-called California effect (Vogel, 1997) and the utilization of trade agreements in the EU’s foreign policy and external relations are well researched. With decreasing effectiveness and limited territorial reach of its enlargement policy, the EU found trade agreements to be particularly effective to set standards on a global level (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig, 2009). The existence of the single market makes the Union not only an important locus of regulation but also a strong economic actor with the global ambition of digital assertiveness. In the past, establishing standards for the EU’s vast consumer market has proven effective in compelling non-European market participants to join.

As the globe’s largest consumer market, Europe aims to project its own data protection laws through the market place principle (lex loci solutionis), requiring any data processor to follow its laws whenever European customers’ data are processed. This paper argues that European data protection law creates a “California Effect”, whereby the EU exerts pressure on extra-territorial markets by unilateral standard setting.

With its GDPR, the EU may have defused the problem of European citizens’ data being stored and evaluated according to the US law. However, it has also set a precedent of extra-territorial applicability of its legislation – despite having previously criticized the USA for such practices. By now, international companies increasingly store data of European customers in Europe to prevent conflicts with EU law. With this decision, the EU will apply its own law on others’ sovereign territory. Conflicts created through the extra-territorial effects of national law may contradict the principle of due diligence obligations but are nevertheless not illegitimate. They may, however, have further unintended effects: Other major economies are likely to be less reluctant in the future about passing legal provisions with extra-territorial effect.

The purpose of this paper is to solve the problem of information privacy and security of social users. Mobile internet and social network are more and more deeply integrated into people’s daily life, especially under the interaction of the fierce development momentum of the Internet of Things and diversified personalized services, more and more private information of social users is exposed to the network environment actively or unintentionally. In addition, a large amount of social network data not only brings more benefits to network application providers, but also provides motivation for malicious attackers. Therefore, under the social network environment, the research on the privacy protection of user information has great theoretical and practical significance.

In this study, based on the social network analysis, combined with the attribute reduction idea of rough set theory, the generalized reduction concept based on multi-level rough set from the perspectives of positive region, information entropy and knowledge granularity of rough set theory were proposed. Furthermore, it was traversed on the basis of the hierarchical compatible granularity space of the original information system and the corresponding attribute values are coarsened. The selected test data sets were tested, and the experimental results were analyzed.

The results showed that the algorithm can guarantee the anonymity requirement of data publishing and improve the effect of classification modeling on anonymous data in social network environment.

In the test and verification of privacy protection algorithm and privacy protection scheme, the efficiency of algorithm and scheme needs to be tested on a larger data scale. However, the data in this study are not enough. In the following research, more data will be used for testing and verification.

In the context of social network, the hierarchical structure of data is introduced into rough set theory as domain knowledge by referring to human granulation cognitive mechanism, and rough set modeling for complex hierarchical data is studied for hierarchical data of decision table. The theoretical research results are applied to hierarchical decision rule mining and k-anonymous privacy protection data mining research, which enriches the connotation of rough set theory and has important theoretical and practical significance for further promoting the application of this theory. In addition, combined the theory of secure multi-party computing and the theory of attribute reduction in rough set, a privacy protection feature selection algorithm for multi-source decision table is proposed, which solves the privacy protection problem of feature selection in distributed environment. It provides a set of effective rough set feature selection method for privacy protection classification mining in distributed environment, which has practical application value for promoting the development of privacy protection data mining.

In this study, the proposed algorithm and scheme can effectively protect the privacy of social network data, ensure the availability of social network graph structure and realize the need of both protection and sharing of user attributes and relational data.

First, the authors analyze the key problems faced by the protection of digital library readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Second, the authors introduce the characteristics of all kinds of existing approaches to privacy protection and their application limitations in the protection of readers' data privacy and behavior privacy. Lastly, the authors compare the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of existing approaches in terms of security, efficiency, accuracy and practicality and analyze the challenges faced by the protection of digital library reader privacy.

In this paper, the authors review a number of research achievements relevant to privacy protection and analyze and evaluate the application limitations of them in the reader privacy protection of a digital library, consequently, establishing the constraints that an ideal approach to library reader privacy protection should meet, so as to provide references for the follow-up research of the problem.

As a result, the authors conclude that an ideal approach to reader privacy protection should be able to comprehensively improve the security of all kinds of readers' privacy information on the untrusted server-side as a whole, under the premise of not changing the architecture, efficiency, accuracy and practicality of a digital library system.

Along with the rapid development of new network technologies, such as cloud computing, the server-side of a digital library is becoming more and more untrustworthy, thereby, posing a serious threat to the privacy of library readers. In fact, the problem of reader privacy has become one of the important obstacles to the further development and application of digital libraries.

The move toward e-health care in various countries is envisaged to reduce the cost of provision of health care, improve the quality of care and reduce medical errors. The most significant problem is the protection of patients’ data privacy. If the patients are reluctant or refuse to participate in health care system due to lack of privacy laws and regulations, the benefit of the full-fledged e-health care system cannot be materialized. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the available e-health data privacy protection laws and the perception of the people using the e-health care facilities.

The researchers used content analysis to analyze the availability and comprehensive nature of the laws and regulations. The researchers also used survey method. Participants in the study comprised of health care professionals (n=46) and health care users (n=187) who are based in the Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The researchers applied descriptive statistics mechanisms and correlational analysis to analyze the data in the survey.

The content analysis revealed that the available health data protection laws are limited in scope. The survey results, however, showed that the respondents felt that they could trust the e-health services systems offered in the UAE as the data collected is protected, the rights are not violated. The research also revealed that there was no significance difference between the nationality and the privacy data statements. All the nationality agreed that there is protection in place for the protection of e-health data. There was no significance difference between the demographic data sets and the many data protection principles.

The findings on the users’ perception could help to evaluate the success in realizing current strategies and an action plan of benchmarking could be introduced.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union (EU) was passed to protect data privacy. Though the GDPR intended to address issues related to data privacy in the EU, it created an extra-territorial effect through Articles 3, 45 and 46. Extra-territorial effect refers to the application or the effect of local laws and regulations in another country. Lawmakers around the globe passed or intensified their efforts to pass laws to have personal data privacy covered so that they meet the adequacy requirement under Articles 45–46 of GDPR while providing comprehensive legislation locally. This study aims to analyze the Malaysian and Saudi Arabian legislation on health data privacy and their adequacy in meeting GDPR data privacy protection requirements.

The research used a systematic literature review, legal content analysis and comparative analysis to critically analyze the health data protection in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia in comparison with GDPR and to see the adequacy of health data protection that could meet the requirement of EU data transfer requirement.

The finding suggested that the private sector is better regulated in Malaysia than the public sector. Saudi Arabia has some general laws to cover health data privacy in both public and private sector organizations until the newly passed data protection law is implemented in 2024. The finding also suggested that the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 of Malaysia and the Personal Data Protection Law 2022 of Saudi Arabia could be considered “adequate” under GDPR.

The research would be able to identify the key principles that could identify the adequacy of the laws about health data in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia as there is a dearth of literature in this area. This will help to propose suggestions to improve the laws concerning health data protection so that various stakeholders can benefit from it.