Individual Privacy In Government Information Publicity System

Different apartments of a government, during their governing, managing social affairs and providing related services, are gathering and keeping enormous amount of information from various fields and different levels, while most of these information can be published and shared by its people.While in the process of government collecting information, citizen’ right to these information can always run into other rights or conflict of interests, that is, the government would forbid some information to become public, which would be the exceptional rule of government information publicity.Those exceptional rules set a lot of categories of such non-public information. Individual privacy is one of them due to its revealing would lead to exposure of private rights and interference of private room.Not like national secrets or commercial secrets, which are all defined explicitly in Law of Guarding State’s Secrets and Anti Unfair Competition Law," individual privacy" has not find itself a clear definition and boundary in laws. In practice, due to the lace of yardstick to distinguish and assess individual privacy, administrative departments or organs would have great discretion, and could easily abuse this discretion as shield of their refusal to public some information, or carelessly reveal some information of real privacy to public, harming citizens’rights.In light of an ambiguous definition of individual privacy in judicial and administrative practice, the article would first present with the very problem of defining individual privacy by listing some typical and classic cases and privacy classification theories, trying to cast a light of such a dilemma to draw boundaries of individual privacy, and also provide with a research method through which this problem could be clearly and logically solved.The second part of this article would focus on exceptional rules of government information publicity, by introducing this institution and the theory behind it, aiming to pointing out a direction for further discussion.The third part would try to define privacy and privacy right in the view of history and establishment and development of such right, and in the background of different law departments. And via evolvement of privacy’s meaning, and comparison on different meanings of privacy, somehow still with some common essence, in different department laws, this part also will summarize the characters and defining methods in the background of government information publicity institution.The fourth part would take The United States of America and Germany as cultural background, analyzing their theories, legislations and practices on privacy protection in freedom of information, and try to summarize some valuable experience for our country.The last article would conclude with a clear definition of individual privacy based on all above discussion, and also design some rules in accordance to help effectively define individual privacy, aiming to improve the current situation brought by blurred boundaries and confused application.