Pope Francis recently removed a rule known as Pontifical Secrecy, which allowed clergy and church officials to withhold information regarding sexual abuse. Will it make the church truly transparent?
Interviews from a range of sensitive research topics may be at risk. These include immigration, crime and corruption.
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Australia’s metadata laws offer weak protection to journalists, but they don’t offer any to academics conducting confidential interviews.
What to do with our old paper medical files now that records are going digital? As a recent Brisbane case demonstrates, not all files are heading straight for destruction.
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Patient information dumped on the side of the road in Brisbane recently has raised the issue of how hospitals and clinics manage their old paper records.
South Australia just became the latest state to pass shield laws, but history shows they haven’t always done their job.
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Melissa Kang, University of Technology Sydney and Lena Sanci, The University of Melbourne
The My Health Record brings a unique set of confidentiality concerns for young people under 18. These need to be better addressed to ensure teens don’t forego important health care.
Time magazine recognized the #MeToo movement as its ‘person’ of the year.
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Time magazine named the #MeToo movement its ‘person’ of the year, highlighting the role companies and nondisclosure agreements play in keeping the victims of abuse silent.
Actor Rose McGowan was recently offered $1 million to agree to keep her settlement with Weinstein secret. She declined.
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Nondisclosure agreements are getting a bad rap these days because they’ve been used to prevent victims of sexual harassment and abuse from speaking out. But not all are nefarious.
When Gay Talese signed a confidentiality agreement with a motel-owning voyeur, he got access to the voyeur’s journals and secret viewing perch. But he also allowed the spying to continue for over a decade.
Today many donor-conceived children are adults and the impacts on their sense of identity have become clear, so Victoria is set to open the records of formerly anonymous donors.
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In a world first, Victoria plans to retrospectively open the records of formerly anonymous sperm donors to all donor-conceived people. A system of contact vetoes aims to manage the privacy concerns.
British American Tobacco says it wants the information to ascertain whether it substantiates government claims about the impact of plain tobacco packaging laws.
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Restricting entities such as tobacco companies’ use of FOI laws is not the best legal response if it helps public bodies generally become more secretive.
Freed of the Liberal Democrats’ influence, here are some of the things the Conservative government has in store for us.
Notions of the ‘right to know’ forced Hillary Clinton to defend her use of a private email account as secretary of state - a far cry from the days when citizens didn’t even know how their representatives voted.
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The idea of the right to know as the ‘lifeblood of democracy’ is a surprisingly modern development. And in an age when transparency is prized, privacy and secrecy can still be justified in many cases.
Frank and open discussions.
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Imagine your partner experiences extreme mood swings: you’ve seen them at their lowest, you’ve seen them at their highest, you’ve seen them when they are well. You’ve “monitored” their mood, checked they’ve…