The concept of information privacy has become more significant as more systems controlling more information appear. Also the consequences of privacy violations can be more severe. Privacy law in many countries has had to adapt to changes in technology in order to address these issues and, to some extent, maintain privacy rights. But the existing global privacy rights framework has also been criticized as incoherent and inefficient. Proposals such as the APEC Privacy Framework have emerged which set out to provide the first comprehensive legal framework on the issue of global data privacy.
There are various theories about privacy and privacy control. The Invasion Paradigm defines privacy violation as the hostile actions of a wrongdoer who causes direct harm to an individual. This is a reactive view of privacy protection as it waits until there is a violation before acting to protect the violated individual, sometimes through criminal punishments for those who invaded the privacy of others. In the Invasion Paradigm this threat of criminal punishment that is supposed to work as deterrent. The Secrecy paradigm defines a privacy invasion as someone’s concealed information or hidden world being revealed through surveillance. The Negative Freedom Paradigm views privacy as freedom from invasion rather than a right, going against the more popular view of a “right to privacy.” Finally, the Inaccessibility Paradigm states that privacy is the state where something is completely inaccessible to others. Daniel Solove, a law professor at George Washington University also has a theory of privacy. He believes that a conceptualized view of privacy will not work because there is no one core element. There are many different, interconnected elements involved in privacy and privacy protection. Therefore, Solove proposes looking at these issues from the bottom up, focusing on privacy problems. People may often overlook the fact that certain elements of privacy problems are due to the structure of privacy itself. Therefore, the architecture must change wherein people must learn to view privacy as a social and legal structure. He also states that people have to redefine the relationship between privacy and businesses and the government. Participation in certain privacy elements of the government and businesses should allow people to choose whether they want to be a part of certain aspects of their work that could be considered privacy invasion.