Multiple choiceQuestion 1 · Recall
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By the end you can define security, privacy and integrity separately, and look at a data disaster and say which of the three it has broken — and which it has not.
A school holds files about you: your marks, your address, your medical notes. Imagine three different disasters.
All three feel like "the data got messed up". Exams, though, want you to name the exact failure:
The three words overlap in real life, but they are not synonyms. Learn the difference and these questions become free marks.
Security (of data)
Security is the protection of data from unauthorised access, use, disclosure, modification or destruction.
The key word is unauthorised. Security asks: is anyone reaching this data who should not be able to? It is delivered by measures such as user accounts, passwords, firewalls, anti-malware software and encryption.
Privacy
Privacy is the right of a person to control who can see and use their personal data, and what it is used for.
Privacy only applies to data that identifies a person — a name, address, medical record, exam result. It asks: is this person's information being kept to the people and purposes they agreed to? Notice that privacy can be broken even with no break-in at all: an employee with perfectly valid access can invade privacy by looking at a record they have no reason to see.
Integrity (of data)
Integrity is the accuracy, consistency and completeness of data. Data with integrity is exactly what it claims to be: it has not been changed, corrupted, duplicated or lost, whether by accident or on purpose.
Integrity asks: can I trust that this value is the value that was stored? Checksums, validation rules, version history and read-only access all help to protect it.
Test yourself on these cases. For each, decide which of the three has actually failed.
| Incident | Security | Privacy | Integrity |
|---|---|---|---|
| A hacker guesses a password and deletes a file of personal data | Broken | Broken — personal data was reached | Broken — data destroyed |
| A doctor with valid access reads a celebrity's notes out of curiosity | Not broken — the login worked as designed | Broken | Not broken |
| A power cut corrupts a file | Not broken — nobody attacked it | Not broken | Broken |
| A clerk types a customer's age as 199 instead of 19 | Not broken | Not broken | Broken |
| A backup tape is stolen from a van | Broken — data left the protected system | Broken | Not broken — the copy is intact |
Two lessons from that table: