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Essay on Outsourcing the Processing of Sensitive Information

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Outsourcing the Processing of Sensitive Information

A current trend in business in the first-world (United States and Western Europe) is for the service sector to follow the lead of the manufacturing sector in looking to the global marketplace to find the lowest-cost means of production. That is, to lower costs and maximize profits, first-world service providers are increasingly seeking to outsource "knowledge worker" type tasks to countries with substantially lower labor costs. The type of work being exported includes telephone call-center support, data entry, the design and implementation of sophisticated software systems, tax preparation and financial bookkeeping. Of particular concern to privacy advocates is that exporting the …show more content…

In fact, the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, prohibits sending personal information to countries that do not have an adequate information security infrastructure. India, with its growing outsourcing industry, is hurrying to pass legislation that will qualify it to process data from the E.U. [5], but often the protection of private information is based on little more than the honor system [3]. The time when the legal structure in developing countries can provide for the protection of information equal to that provided in developed countries may remain a decade or more in the future.

The Internet is the technology that largely makes outsourcing business processes possible. It also makes the transmittal of personal information overseas particularly problematic. Using the Internet, the potential now exists for the disclosure of sensitive data by almost anyone on a scale previously achievable only through controlled mass media channels. Personal information can now be broadcast world-wide, by practically anyone, from practically anywhere. If an individual in the United States were to disclose privileged information, remedies are available to

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