State v. Levie
The main purpose of encryption is to change any data to a humanly unreadable form. Nowadays, encryption is seen as one of the key solutions to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of information. 
Companies and governmental entities have been spending time and money implementing ways to fight cybercrime and increase awareness between internet users and general public with the purpose to reduce the occurrence of crimes such as Identity theft. 
Mainly, one can say that encryption is about privacy. The right to a "safety zone" and privacy exists in the First and Fourth Amendment rights in the USA where a remarkable and recent privacy-based law has been approved, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. In Europe the Lisbon Treaty describes the protection of fundamental data as fundamental human right. 
While achieving privacy through the use of encryption seems to provide everyone with answers to decrease the disclosure of personal information, it benefits the possibility to conceal from authorities acts of terrorism, child pornography and others.
The use of encryption tools is becoming more and more disseminated; states are starting to make a crime "to use encryption". States like Illinois in USA are creating specific laws to handle this matter : "A person shall not knowingly use or attempt to use encryption, directly or indirectly, to:
Column level encryption
Generally, when data are being collected and stored as records, those records will appear in a tabular format in rows in the database with each rows logging specific attributes. Some data can be more sensitive than others, for example, data of birth, social security number, home address, etc., which can act as a personal identification. In order to ensure that these private information is transferred and stored securely, data goes through encryption, which is the process of encoding plaintext into ciphertext. Non-designated readers or receivers will not be able to read the data without the decryption key. Another example to illustrate this concept is, given a database stores client's phone numbers. The set of phone numbers will appear to most readers as gibberish alphanumerical text with a mix of symbols, totally useless to those who do not have access privilege to view the data in plaintext (original form).