Personal data protection

Internet users are frequently required to provide personal data online. If you start up a yahoo or hotmail account, register for an online banking service or buy your groceries online, you will be asked to provide personal information about yourself. Whenever you buy goods or services online, you also have to provide highly sensitive information such as credit card numbers or personal identifiers such as your Hong Kong ID card number. Similarly, as corporations and institutions such as hospitals and universities increasingly adopt electronic databases, private information about your health, education, employment and travel histories is increasingly prone to misuse. Although there are measures in the Data Protection (Privacy) Ordinance to protect how these kinds of data are collected, used and shared, a certain amount of responsibility for the protection of data privacy also falls upon individual Internet users.