The United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has established a list of fair information practices that concentrates on the privacy of individually identifiable personal information, which declare:
- There must not be personal data record-keeping systems whose very existence is secret.
- There must be a way for a person to find out what information about them is in a record and how it is used.
- There must be a way for a person to prevent information about them, which was obtained for one purpose, from being used or made available for other purposes without their consent.
- Any organization creating, maintaining, using, or disseminating records of identifiable personal data must ensure the reliability of the data for their intended use and must take precautions to prevent misuses of that data.
