**1. Introduction**

Broad use of smart phones, e-commerce, social media, Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT) has transformed our lives. Though digitization facilitates our work, it is prone to privacy vulnerabilities. The key privacy threats include surveillance, disclosure, targeted advertisements [1], identity theft, information disclosure without consent, personal abuse through cyber stalking [2], studying emotions and mood of the people by accessing profile pictures, tweets, likes and comments to find emotionally weak, people who are lonely and trap them using various cyber-attacks like ransom ware, sexual abuse etc. [3]. Firms dealing with data sensitive applications need to follow certain ethical code of conduct to ensure privacy and guard the users from various digital assaults.

Digital data include variety of personal data like transactional data, location data, electronic medical records, e-commerce data, insurance data, photos and videos, opinions and views etc. All these data items are personal and sensitive data and should not be disclosed without the consent of the data owner. Privacy breach can occur at various stages of data processing as described in **Figure 1**.

**Figure 1.** *Data processing stages.*

Data breach can occur at any stage of data processing with different type of people operating at various levels. The top-level management should ensure that no data breach occur at any stage for which there is a need to have a policy in place and ethical code of conduct for all employees of the firm. However, policies alone are not sufficient; there must be regulatory body to ascertain the policies are implemented. Apart from this, the individuals are also contributing to data leakage by inappropriate use of social media and smart phones. Hence there are three entities responsible to ensure privacy preservation (**Figure 2**).

Governments and regulatory bodies are more responsible than others because Governments can impose privacy regulations and make sure the data holder or data collecting firms abide by them. Data holders are also equally responsible because data is with them and they can share the data with third parties without the knowledge of the data owner. By inappropriate use of social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, etc. users are also uploading personal data into the public domain which leads to privacy threats. With the consistent escalation of privacy threats and their grave consequences, awareness among users has also increased and in turn increased the demand for privacy preservation, which eventually led to the creation of privacy laws and regulations in many countries. The most prominent among them are GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) of the European Union and the Personal Data Protection bill of India. Some of the applications along with its privacy risk are listed in **Table 1**.

**Figure 2.** *Entities responsible for privacy preservation.*

*Modern Privacy Threats and Privacy Preservation Techniques in Data Analytics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99160*


**Table 1.** *Application vs. privacy risk.*
