Detecting privacy and ethical sensitivity in data mining results
ACSC '04 Proceedings of the 27th Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 26
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Developing principles that address the confidentiality of health information, has presented significant challenges in society, particularly to health care providers. In this context, an important dilemma is whether to breach confidentiality in the case of the risk of harming identifiable individuals. This paper argues that the RIGHT of the third-party person to his/her private information outweighs maintaining patient confidentiality. The private information involved is 'compound' information that identifies several individuals, hence, is 'owned' by all of its proprietors. A systematic approach to confidential private information is introduced based on defining the private information in terms of assertions about its proprietors: those identifiable individuals that are referred to in the assertions. We apply this thesis to the Tarasoff case and extend our ethical justification to cover breaching confidentiality in genetic testing.