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 In an era increasingly dominated by digital interactions and data-driven decision-making, data privacy and cybersecurity have emerged as critical concerns for individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide.

Data privacy and cybersecurity are different but closely related. Data privacy revolves around rules, guidelines, and your own personal choices about who has access to your data, and how much access they have. Cybersecurity is focused on preventing and solving threats like hackings, malware, and online scams (Cook, 2023). Therefore, the first step to ensuring cybersecurity is to provide data privacy since data privacy is a subset of cybersecurity. However, data privacy is a critical concern because it is difficult to find a balance between data privacy and data transparency.

Covid-19 is an excellent example to illustrate this problem. In supporting the effort in mitigating disease transmission from Covid-19, the cloud, cell-networks and IoT devices such as smart-phones, sensors and domestic appliances, continue to play a vital role in a wide range of global Tracing-Testing-Tracking programs (Wylde et al., 2022). In this situation, a government monitored app is what the government promotes to ensure data transparency. However, research (Wylde et al., 2022) shows that about 50% of the population refused to use the app as they knew that data transparency usually comes with the risk of data privacy breaches, and that could undermine a government’s ability in effectively handling data collection and the processing of critical medical information. Therefore, the government has to develop a solution that ensures data transparency while preventing data privacy breaches.

Privacy is also a sensitive issue in the business context. E-commerce sites are collecting a high amount of data related to customer preference, their buying patterns and the things they search at high volume. Business analysts are
using this data for the personalization of a customer’s experience and
for the improvement of the e-site(Muneer, 2018). And this is the point of conflict between data privacy and data transparency. To improve customers’ experience, transparent data is necessary for business analysts. However, some privacy concerns are raised by customers:

• Consumers are concerned about unauthorized access due to security breaches(Muneer, 2018).
• They are concerned about secondary use – the reuse of their personal data such as sharing the data with third parties(Muneer, 2018).

Therefore, improving data privacy is necessary for e-commerce sites as it will improve consumer trust in the brand and lead to a competitive power among competitors.