A Comparative Study on Information Privacy Protection Acts in Iran and Selected

Despite its advantages, expansion of information and communication technologies (ICTs), have increasingly put citizens at the risk of violating their information privacy by governmental or non-governmental organizations. In this article, the legislations advocating information privacy in Iran and selected countries have been comparatively studied and some solutions have been proposed for decreasing the existing gap between Iran and international standards.
This article draws on qualitative method, including documentary study, content analysis (with open and axial coding), and comparative study. Statistical population of this study includes 58 countries with information privacy act which 6 countries were selected (Republic of Korea, England, France, Canada, Italy and Ireland) as pioneer countries.The framework for comparative study has 7 dimensions: principles of collection, use, retention and disclosure of data, data subject rights, controller responsibilities and principles of data subject’s accessing to data. According to this study, information privacy protection status in Iran is far from selected countries and international standards.
Based on this study, there are two main gaps in protecting citizens’ information privacy in Iran: legislative and supervisory gaps. Iran is far from leading countries in terms of existence of information privacy protection legislation. Leading countries legislations support citizens’ general and sensitive personal data. But Iranian legislations only support the latter one (sensitive personal data) on a limited basis. of 124 identified obligations for protecting information privacy, 81 obligations have been repeated in at least four of six selected countries. There are only 13 of these obligations in Iranian legislations. It seems that due to supervisory gap in Iran, execution of these 13 obligations confronts some problems. It is hoped that the proposed principles in this study could pave a way for enacting rules for protecting information privacy in Iran.