摘要：In this paper we use an Information Systems (informatics) perspective to critically examine legislation designed to regulate the way private sector organizations collect, store, use, and disclose personal information. We focus on The Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 (Cth), which has recently been enacted in Australia. We argue that the ability of organizations to respond to the requirements of this legislation is affected by the data quality of the personal information they possess. In particular, this paper examines one problem associated with data quality that erodes an organization's ability to comply with legislation designed to protect the information privacy of individuals – the fragmentation of customer data across multiple databases owned and maintained by separate functional units within an organization. Given the ubiquity of these kinds of data quality problems we conclude that current legislative regimes to regulate private sector use of personal information in countries such as Australia and European Union member states can lead to contrary outcomes resulting in legislation that is either unenforceable or acts to encourage the development of high-quality, integrated customer databases that have the potential to erode information privacy. We believe that new models able to grapple with management of personal information in distributed, mobile and ubiquitous computing environments need to be developed.
