Privacy as a Base for Confidentiality

Abstract

Privacy and information technology are inextricably tied to society’s ethical and legal issues. In this paper we propose to base confidentiality of private information on the consent of all proprietors of that information. Informational privacy can be used to justify the breach of professional obligation for confidentiality in cases involving third parties, instead of relying on the ad hoc notion of safety, which requires determining standards of the profession. A systematic approach to confidential private information is introduced based on defining private information in terms of assertions about its proprietors, those identifiable individuals that are referred to in the assertions. A discernment of the confidentiality of private information is developed based on the notion of transferring private information by its possessor to a third party. Of special interest in this study is the compound private information that embeds references to a third party. We claim that this type of private information “belongs” to its referents including the third party. This concept is applied in the context of the well-known Tarasoff case, which involves a conflict between a patient’s right to confidentiality vs. the third party’s right to his/her private information.