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Post University Blog

By Harry Morrow Long, CIS Associate Faculty Member

Data Privacy Day is held on January 28th, as it has been held each year since 2007. The day commemorates the 1981 signing of Council of Europe’s Convention 108, the first international agreement on data privacy.

Data Privacy Day (AKA Data Protection Day in Europe) promotes privacy awareness as well as education regarding privacy laws, policies, and best practices for protecting data in an annual campaign supported by corporations, non-profit organizations, and governments.

COVID-19 has made privacy protections even more critical this year.  The reason for keeping both: (1) the identity of individuals who have contracted COVID-19 confidential as well as (2)  increased demand and interest by many of those worried that they may have been exposed to COVID-19 to have the names of all of those who have or have had COVID-19 made public.

This tension between privacy and the need for medical information to perform contact-tracing has been uneasily resolved by “anonymizing” individual’s identities in smart-phone “apps” that can provide information on whether you may have been exposed to COVID-19 based on your location.

But advocating for and protecting privacy is everyone’s business, whether student, faculty, staff, family, or others!

And being open and publicly transparent about what privacy practices an organization is following (by publishing their Privacy Policy and practices)  should apply to all corporations, governments, and non-profits who gather, hold, and process our personal information.

But only 74% of the public have rarely or never read a company’s privacy policy before accepting it (e.g. via a shrinkwrap agreement or web popup dialog box) and 81% of Americans feel that they have no control over when data is collected from us!

[ Source: Pew Research Center, Americans, and Privacy Report, 2019 ]

If you haven’t made a New Year’s resolution yet this year and want to control the privacy of your personal data, make a resolution to do one or more of the following:

  • Update the privacy settings on one or more of your social media accounts. ( See staysafeonline.org/stay-safe-online/managing-your-privacy/update-privacy-settings/ )
  • Protect the privacy and safety of your family’s personal, health, and financial information by protecting the security of the passwords for important websites.
  • Learn why privacy (and transparency about privacy) is good for businesses.
    ( staysafeonline.org/resource/privacy-good-business )
  • Learn more about privacy and what you can do at the website :
    • staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day
  • Find and read entertaining and educational social media posts (particularly Facebook and Twitter) promoting Data Privacy Day 2021 using the hashtag #PrivacyAware
  • Critically read the posted Privacy Policies for social media, software apps, and websites that you use!

The Privacy Policies for two of Post University’s major web sites can be found at :

Post University main Website: https://post.edu/privacy-policy/

“You at Post” website: https://you.post.edu/privacy-policy/