Consumer privacy protection is the use of laws and regulations to protect individuals from privacy loss due to the failures and limitations of corporate customer privacy measures. Corporations may be inclined to share data for commercial advantage and fail to officially recognize it as sensitive to avoid legal liability in the chance that lapses of security may occur. Modern consumer privacy law originated from telecom regulation when it was recognized that a telephone company had access to unprecedented levels of information. Customer privacy measures were seen as deficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, employee turnover, and theft of data storage devices (e.g., hard drives) that could store a large amount of data in a portable location.