Privacy is one of the most important issues facing the Internet. Governments must be responsible custodians of the enormous amounts of personal information they hold.

Governments collect vast quantities of data on their citizens through everyday transactions. As e-government services grow in scope and popularity, those databases will expand in size and detail. Protecting the privacy of citizens' personal information stored on these databases while making effective use of the information contained in them is a vitally important issue, one which policy- makers must address if citizens are asked to entrust sensitive personal, financial and medical data to the government in order to utilize Internet-based e-government systems. Government websites and online services must adhere to privacy best practices.

Privacy must be addressed in the planning and design of e-government systems since it is much harder to interject privacy protections after a system is built. Government websites and online services should fully comply with the fair information principles outlined, for example, by Ontario, Canada, in its privacy impact assessment tool.