Confidential

The issues

Who owns confidential information?
In the context of a place of employment, does it belong to an employer or to an employee?
Is one liable for disclosing confidential information without permission?
When is information no longer confidential?
What is a lawyer's responsibility to his client?
What is a doctor's responsibility to his patient?
What is a rabbi's responsibility to his community and to its individual members?

The Jewish Perspective

In the absence of explicit permission from the person who has given information, a recipient of information is obliged to respect the confidentiality of any information he has concerning others. There is an all-embracing prohibition of lo selech rochel b'amecha (not to go around being a gossiper among your people), which precludes giving others any information held about another person, unless it is strictly necessary for the other party to receive this information.

A solicitor is obliged to maintain the confidences of his client, not only in those matters which are strictly confidential but in other circumstances too. The same applies to a rabbi who, if he receives confidential information from members of his community, must maintain that confidence. Nor is a rabbi permitted to discuss members of his community, unless he has received explicit permission to do so.

The communication by any person of proprietary information is automatically to be treated as confidential until permission to disclose it is explicitly given.

The requirement for confidentiality in Jewish law extends to the prohibition of reading letters, emails, documents and faxes addressed to others. It is also prohibited to derive benefit from information which one receives (i) unlawfully or (ii) lawfully, but on the basis that one will not make use of it.

It follows from this is that "data mining" (obtaining information through the arrangement and analysis of data which a business may in any event possess) may actually constitute a breach of an individual's privacy and confidentiality unless explicit permission has been received for this purpose.

In practical terms, this may prohibit credit card companies from mining the data that they have about people's individual preferences of purchases when they do not have explicit permission to do (see Aaron Levene, Case Studies in Jewish Business Ethics, p. 69).

According to Jewish law there is an implicit confidentiality requirement in every employment contract. It is assumed that any information that an employee gains from his employment belongs to his employer and that the employee has no right to benefit from it -- and certainly not to repeat it.

It is permitted to violate a confidence in order to prevent damage or hurt to another person. In such a case the recipient of information would not only have a right but also a duty to prevent that other person being damaged.