Financial privacy Definition
Financial Privacy is a blanket term for a multitude of issues:
- Financial Institutions ensuring that their customers information remains private to those outside the institution. Issues include the Patriot Act, and other debates of privacy vs. security.
- The term is also used to describe the issue of financial institutions selling customer information to other companies so that those companies may use that for marketing, and especially telemarketing purposes. This issue however is mixed with the issue of financial institutions sharing information within themselves, which could be considered "sharing information between companies" since a financial institution is not allowed to be one company for regulatory reasons, but instead must assume a holding company structure. This sense of the word has been the main issue debated in the United States during the 21st century.