Law - Confidentiality and Privacy

Law of Confidence is key to a person keeping their private lives separate from the public. This ensures total privacy with information that is exchanged in a private or confidential circumstance, for example when you are talking to your doctor - all medical files are confidential between doctor and patient.

There are three elements to determine when a breach of confidence has occurred:
- The information must be shared in a confidential manner.
- It must also have the necessary quality of confidence (so it can't be something trivial).
- For action to be taken there must be an unauthorised use of the information.

Journalists must be mindful in terms of confidence and privacy when reporting on three areas:
- Official Secrets Act: this keeps safe all military intelligence information for example the location of bases or information that could be harmful to the safety of the country if it was exposed, much like the phrase 'spilling state secrets'.
- Individual Privacy: Section 8 of the Human Rights act defends individual privacy, so that concerns your family life and anything else that would be deemed out of the public sphere.
- Commercial Confidentiality: this will be in contracts of employees essentially saying they can't release sensitive information that would be damaging to the employer.

You can defence breaches of confidence or privacy by proving if the information did not have the necessary quality of confidence or if the information is in the public sphere. The main defence would be that if it is in the public interest to know this information. Naomi Campbell won a breach of privacy concerning a newspaper publishing images of her leaving a narcotics anonymous meeting.

When a journalist obtains sensitive information they have two choices:
- They can just run the story and face potential legal repercussion, but you should really only do this if you could justify it in the public interest and not merely interesting to the public.
- The other choice is to confront the business / person that the information pertains to and try to get a response, but this could lead to an injunction and therefore the information will be swept under the rug.