ABSTRACT
In our current world, we often face the concomitant needs of maintaining privacy and revealing to others to attain medical care, establish friendships, sustain family relationships, open bank accounts, get a passport, and talk to our clergy. In all cases, to achieve these goals, we have to tell others our private information. When we make these disclosures, we create a bond with the recipient. There is an implicit or explicit contract that we establish with the "confidant." We think about the targets of our disclosure as people who are likely to keep our information "confidential." Yet, there are many incidents where the contract of confidentiality is breached in ways that violate our trust, undercut our privacy, and compromise our expectations about the nature of confidentiality. While we see these issues in our everyday life, the instability of faith in maintaining privacy has both personal and societal consequences. As Kenneth Prewitt, former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, points out, it is difficult to have the kind of democracy we enjoy in the United States without access to information. He notes that, "if privacy issues [and the belief in confidentiality] begin to erode the information base of our democracy, there is a high price to pay" (Prewitt, 2005, p. 17). This chapter uses communication privacy management theory (Petronio, 2002) to explore the relationship between privacy and confidentiality to better understand the reasons why people are increasingly finding it difficult to have faith in the notion of confidentiality.
