Challenges of the digital age for privacy and personal data protection

Digital age can be described as a collection of different technological solutions as virtual environments, digital services, intelligent applications, machine learning, knowledge-based systems, etc., determining the specific characteristics of contemporary world globalization, e-communications, information sharing, virtualization, etc. However, there is an opportunity the technologies of the digital age to violate some basic principles of the information security and privacy by unregulated access to information and personal data, stored in different nodes of the global network. The goal of the article is to determine some special features of information and personal data protection and to summarise the main challenges of the digital age for the user's security and privacy. A brief presentation of the fundamental legislation in the fields of privacy and personal data protection is made in the introduction, followed by a review of related work on the topic. Components of information security for counteracting threats and attacks and basic principles in the organization of personal data protection are discussed. A summary of the basic challenges of the digital age is made by systematizing the negatives for user's privacy of the contemporary technologies as social computing, cloud services, Internet of Things, Big Data and Big Data Analytics and separate requirements to secure privacy of the participants based on General Data Protection Regulation principles are formulated. Keywords: technologies of the digital age; information security; privacy; data protection; e-Privacy; challenges for the privacy