By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 05/30/05

Here's a new item for your to-do list: Craft a data privacy architecture for your organization.

Last week's column closed with a quote from Bruce Schneier, noted cryptographer and security guru, about the challenges of ensuring privacy in the Information Age. It's a nontrivial issue: Many key U.S. privacy laws predate the Internet, and courts have been contradictory at best when it comes to interpreting them in the context of electronic communications and presence technologies.

Moreover, although several regulations collectively govern data privacy and identity-information management in different geographies and industries, the U.S. (unlike Canada, the European Union and Japan) lacks an overall framework setting out the principles of privacy for all citizens.