As technology becomes more fully integrated with government services and private life, the data it produces must be managed carefully and guarded from malicious hackers. States play an important role in safeguarding privacy, employing cybersecurity measures to protect citizen data, and shaping privacy standards for the private sector.
It is difficult to inject security and privacy principles into finished projects. It is much easier to adhere to change to privacy best practices by building them into the earliest proposals for any state initiative, whether it is a new web application or a new agency.