What is the difference between personal privacy and government secrecy

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Reprints and Permissions. Relyea, H. Freedom of information, privacy, and official secrecy: The evolution of federal government information policy concepts. Soc Indic Res 7, — Download citation. Received : 07 June Issue Date : January Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Skip to main content.

Search SpringerLink Search. There are certainly circumstances in which employees of government institutions, local authorities, and trustee organizations need to legitimately share information in order for their programs to function. However, sharing information may seem contrary to what confidentiality agreements require of them. Back to Blog. You may choose to have a unique web analytics cookie identification number assigned to your computer to provide aggregation and analysis of data collected on this website.

For example, during the battle for the publication of the expenses of British members of parliament MPs , it was repeatedly claimed that disclosing certain information e. Some cases may be considered less clear-cut.

In , the daughter of a Thai woman called Sumalee Limpaovart was denied entry to the elite, government-run Kasetsart Demonstration School. Limpaovart was told that her daughter had failed the entrance exam. While the appeal was in process, the school offered a compromise: an anonymised list of test results. It then became clear that many of them came from prominent political and business families.

Yet unlike the MPs, the children were not responsible for the misdeeds of their parents and teachers. Candidates for public office tend to pay lip service to government transparency but show little genuine commitment to it once in power.

And many governments have yet to learn that disorganised outpourings of information actually undermine transparency. People are aware that, when used effectively by citizens and applied correctly by public officials, they can be a powerful tool for combating corruption and holding the powerful to account. By contrast, government transparency seems to be dwindling in the US, which has had a Freedom of Information Act for over half a century. It may be that the right to information, like a muscle, needs frequent and vigorous exercise in order to function as effectively as possible.

And although the role of the internet in realising and strengthening this power is not always a straightforward one, information technologies can be extremely valuable tools for promoting transparency and empowering citizens.

Although concepts of security and privacy are tangled, we know that it is possible to have security without privacy, but impossible to have privacy without security. As technology advances, and use of technology increases, we become more and more dependent on it. Our dependence, however, makes us more vulnerable to security threats such as identity theft and email hacks.

Information systems and the data they contain have been compromised because of inadequate security. The resulting loss of data can have meaningful consequences to individuals whose data is stored on these systems. Unfortunately, security breaches are so common that they are almost statistically inevitable. Those stats strongly indicate the need for beefed up cybersecurity. Beyond the technical issues, your visitors should understand what they can expect from your website and digital communication channels.

There is increased demand, as emphasized by Silicon Valley, for us to roll out new functionality and advance the user experience. Now more than ever, those of us in health communication must acknowledge the need to innovate while we also maintain the security and privacy of our users. Many Federal agencies have developed public awareness and education campaigns to address HIV prevention, treatment, care, and research.