The Problem Of Privacy Protection In The Publicity Of Government Information

The framework used to deal with conflicts between the right to know and the right of privacy in traditional government information publicity issues should be as follows:(a)Discussing whether the government information belongs to personal privacy or not.In the circumstance of "disclosure",privacy should contain at least two factors,namely,information concerning an individual and practical obscurity.When it comes to "exposure",the information per se should have the qualities of embarrassment,stigmatization,or undermine the public order and good custom.(b)The public good should only be determined by the purpose of the law.(c)The principle of proportionality should be applied when weighing the weight of privacy and the public good.The degree of the infringement of privacy should be analyzed from three perspectives,that is,the possibility,the severity and the duration of the infringement.In the Big Data era,there is a new way to develop open government,namely,open data.Based on data's utility,open data is active,comprehensive,instant and convenient,and has many advantages over traditional government information publicity.In open data system,the concept of personal privacy is outdated,and the concept of "the risk of privacy infringement" should be applied when balancing pros and cons;public good refers both to government transparency and to economic benefit.When dealing with the problem that whether certain government information should be open or not,personal data and pseudonymous data should not be disclosed.As for non-personal data and anonymous data,the "risk-benefit" analysis should be used in a case-by-case manner with the knowledge from various fields,such as law,information technology and information resources management,in order to evaluate the risk of privacy infringement and the public good respectively.In addition,in the open data system,privacy and public good is no longer independent from each other.Too much protection of privacy will undermine the utility of data and thus hurt public good.Accordingly,people may rely on controlled open data which poses limitations on data access or data proceeding in some circumstances to protect public good.