This concluding chapter takes stock of the ways in which the bioinformation governance landscape would look different if it were to embrace the picture of narrative identity impacts, interests, and responsibilities characterised and defended in this book. It proposes that information subjects’ identity-related interests in whether and how they encounter information about their bodies, biology, and health should be firmly installed amongst and routinely weighed alongside the other ethical concerns – such as protecting health, privacy, confidentiality, and autonomy. This does not mean that identity interests should invariably prevail over other ethical, practical, or legal considerations but that they should be afforded weight commensurate with the centrality of an inhabitable, embodied self-narrative to a full, flourishing, and practically engaged life. Mindful of what has been said about the ways in which identity impacts vary between information types and individual circumstances and thus the need for responsive rather than rigid disclosure policies and practices, this chapter proposes priorities for reform in five contexts in which ethical and legal debates about information access are currently pressing. These contexts are donor conception, including mitochondrial donation; return of individual research findings to participants; navigating confidentiality and consent in healthcare; direct-to-consumer genomics; and personal health-tracking devices.

Chapter 3 explains the procedural guarantees established in the Agreement on Safeguards, including the transparency requirements of an initiation notice and a report setting forth the findings and conclusions, as well as due process guarantees for interested parties during the investigation, including the possibility of making submissions on the basis of public interest. The chapter also explains the complexities of the granting of confidential treatment to information provided by the interested parties, including the subsmission of non-confidential summaries.

The chapter describes how the clinical psychologist can work in rural and remote settings. The specific rewards and challenges are outlined. The chapter reviews the effectiveness of therapy at a distance and developments in the delivery of clinical psychology services. Consideration is given to the relevant legislation and regulations, and provides a practical guide to providing therapy at a distance. These steps involve a consideration of privacy and security, risk management, telehealth, and adapting therapeutic skills to the digital and distance context. The chapter concludes with the unique elements of mental health services in rural communities and the impact on professional boundaries of life in small communities.

Clinical psychology trainees embarking on a professional career are faced with the prospect of work that, daily, has ethical questions and challenges to respond to people from varied cultures and social groups. The chapter describes how to provide a culturally-sensitive clinical psychology practice. It evaluates the current evidence-base antecedences guiding practice. The chapter suggests how Structured Problem Solving can be applied to help acquire greater skills in engaging with people from different cultures and groups (e.g., the elderly). The same Structured Problem Solving approach is then applied to ethical decision-making and illustrated with a discussion on confidentiality and dual relationships. The chapter outlines how these approaches may help the clinical psychologist respect the humanity of their clients in all facets of their engagement.

This chapter contains the second part of book’s study on cloud computing contracts.

The chapter examines how general contract law, as defined in the chapter, will likely apply to the use of cloud computing services. This chapter focuses on terms that are often considered standard in cloud agreements. The analysis includes terms aimed at keeping information confidential, non-disclosure agreements, terms regarding liability, warranties, and other terms and conditions aimed at regulating or limiting responsibility. Additionally, the chapter considers terms aimed at termination of services, portability and other provisions necessary for exiting services.

In addition to offering an evaluation of specific contract terms, the chapter also evaluates how governments might create better cloud computing contracts to generate more consistent and compliant results.

This chapter considers the protection afforded to documents as part of the litigation process. The documents in question include both the pre-trial documents discussed in both Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 and documents that are produced at trial. It is more difficult to protect the confidentiality of documents produced at trial because most trials are held in open court. Civil dispute resolution inevitably involves the provision of information between parties and this can come at a significant cost to party confidentiality. Litigation involves an even greater sacrifice of confidentiality as the key requirement for open justice means that confidential material discussed in open court can become public knowledge through judgments, court transcripts or media reporting of open court hearings.1 However, even litigation attempts to minimise the invasion of party privacy, and privilege is one of the key protections the law provides to ensure that the need to put material before the court does not create perverse incentives for parties.

Ethical thinking is an indispensable component of sound professional practice across all areas of applied psychology. Within it, practitioners seek to take account of both the principles formulated in codes of conduct and the rights of all the involved participants. In this chapter we first describe the background to and the fundamental concepts of normative ethics before examining the agreed practical ethical principles that determine standards of work and the processes of ethically aware decision making. We identify the major sources of philosophical thought that have influenced the development of professional codes of practice. Examining the implications of this in a variety of contexts in forensic psychology, we focus on the most frequently encountered moral dilemmas and challenges that arise. They are drawn from the areas of working with clients, professional supervision, and research; and involve issues such as the protection of confidentiality, avoidance of role conflicts, resolution of the sometimes incongruent priorities of individual and public domains, and management of boundaries in professional relationships.

Although the United States has long had a history of allowing anonymous gamete donation, that “anonymity” does not actually exist, given the increasingly widespread use of DTC genetic testing. Over 15 million people have undergone DTC autosomal genetic tests, and. recent studies show that a genetic database covering only two percent of the population could match nearly anyone in that population, especially if they are of European-descent. In the US, assisted reproduction is accessed overwhelmingly by those of European-descent. Thus, a legal regime that allows “anonymous” donation is misleading those involved with donor gametes. Although there are passionate debates about the need to preserve anonymity to ensure that there are enough sperm and egg donors available for those who seek assisted reproduction, those arguments are moot due to the state of DTC testing and the language of “anonymous” donation misleads all of the parties involved with donor conception. Clinics are able to claim this in order to ensure a steady supply of gamete donors. This chapter addresses the legal and ethical quandaries that the facade of anonymous donation creates and suggests how to best resolve these issues with both public law and private governance strategies.

The United Kingdom’s decision to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union triggered serious ripples across its constitutional order, including repeat clashes between Parliament and the Government. This friction reached a crescendo in 2018, following the former’s unprecedented decision to hold the latter in contempt for refusing to obey its request to publish the Attorney General’s full legal advice on the Government’s draft Withdrawal Agreement with the EU. One of the many interesting constitutional issues thrown into sharp focus by this event, was the important relationship between executive power and the legal advice-giving role of executive lawyers.

Using the UK and Ireland as illustrative examples, this essay considers how the work of executive lawyers interacts with executive authority. I argue that their legal advice can be important in supporting the executive’s political narratives about the basis for controversial policy action or inaction and is deployed by the executive to enhance its perceived legal credibility and political legitimacy. Its relationship to exercises of public power deserves greater positive and normative scrutiny, both in each system and from a comparative public law perspective more broadly.

Privacy is a well-established element of the governance and narrative of modern society. In research, it is a mainstay of good and best practice; major research initiatives all speak of safeguarding participants’ rights and ensuring ‘privacy protecting’ processing of personal data. However, while privacy protection is pervasive in modern society and is at the conceptual heart of human rights, it remains nebulous in character. For researchers who engage with people in their studies, the need to respect privacy is obvious, yet how to do so is less so. This chapter offers first an explanation of why privacy is a difficult concept to express, how the law approaches the concept, and how it might be explored as a broader normative concept that can be operationalised by researchers. In that broad scheme, I show how individuals respond to the same privacy situation in different ways – that we have a range of privacy sensitivities. I think about four privacy elements in the law: human rights, privacy in legal theory, personal data protection and consent. Finally, I consider how law participates in the broader normative understanding of property as the private life lived in society.

In a liberal political regime, individuals are accorded a basic right to private autonomy. Individuals are assumed to be the best judges of their own interests in most contexts, under appropriate conditions of rationality. They can thus enter into legal relationships with others and shape the content of those relationships in the form of specific rights and obligations. Private autonomy supports the recognition of the right to arbitration. Private parties should be entitled to opt for arbitration to settle controversies involving their own interests. Arbitration, moreover, offers potential advantages over litigation in court, having to do with specialization and expertise, procedural flexibility, speed, privacy and confidentiality. Arbitration is grounded in private autonomy, not on utilitarian considerations. The right to arbitration is not absolute, of course. The state is authorized to place restrictions on it, in the name of public interests and values. But the state bears a burden of justification.

State-to-state arbitration offers some potential advantages as a dispute-resolution mechanism. These advantages are similar to those arbitration displays in other settings, having to do with specialization, procedural flexibility, speed, and confidentiality. The chapter examines some of the strengths and weaknesses of state-to-state arbitration. It also discusses the arbitrability of peremptory norms of international law (ius cogens), the interaction between arbitrators and the International Court of Justice in the lawmaking process, and the extent to which arbitration is likely to be avoided as a procedure to settle disputes among member states of a supranational organization.

Lawyers wear many hats and engage in a range of diverse, specialised work. However, regardless of the hat they wear or area of law they practice, a lawyer’s basic role is almost always the same: to provide legal services to a client. Whether appearing as an advocate in court, providing advice, preparing documents or any of the other countless services a lawyer may provide, the lawyer–client relationship is the jumping-off point.

Risk assessment is a key area within looking after a patient with an eating disorder and this chapter is one of the key chapters for any trainee. Eating disorders carry high levels of physical health risk which need monitoring and managing but additionally the behavioural and psychosocial risks must not be neglected. This is one of the three core chapters identified within the book.

In Chapter 3, we provide an overview of sensitive information in global governance and important historical context. The chapter first describes new data on the confidentiality features of a sample of 106 IOs. We review variation in the frequency and form of such protections and show that measures to protect various forms of sensitive information are surprisingly common and vary in interesting ways. The chapter then describes the rise of the norm of transparency in diplomacy and global governance after World War I, which then deepened with the end of the Cold War. This is juxtaposed with early examples of IOs experimenting with confidentiality and sensitive information. The chapter concludes by explaining how changes in technology and broader cooperative goals have generally led to efforts to integrate sensitive information into IOs, despite the resulting tension with transparency.

Is it ethical when doctors breach their pregnant patients’ confidentiality? Is it legal? What about HIPAA (properly known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996)? Are there different rules for pregnant women than for men? These are some of the questions women ask me after I give a talk. I understand this bewilderment and, for many, fear. At the heart of their questions resides this chilling thought: Could this happen to me or my daughter? Depending on where they live, the answer may be yes. And, increasingly, wealth will not save them. As this Chapter explains, physicians owe their patients care, confidentiality, loyalty, and trust, and the principle that undergirds all of this – the fiduciary relationship – is not contingent on the sex of the patient. However, with increased pressure from state legislatures and prosecutors, some doctors and nurses have abrogated their responsibilities to their patients. Among them, some are genuinely fearful that unless they adhere to whatever law enforcement demands of them, they may lose their licenses to practice medicine. Some of these doctors are genuinely ambivalent about their duties. These doctors tell me they feel powerless.

This chapter addresses the topic of information we receive about or from patients and introduces the concepts of privacy and confidentiality in relation to the management of patient information. In this chapter we also outline legal requirements for reporting harmful conduct of health professionals and others. Providing excellent nursing care for a patient requires that each nurse involved in the patient’s care acquire relevant information from the patient (or a representative) concerning the patient’s symptoms, their lifestyle, their medications, their concerns and their experiences. Therefore, nurses routinely see, hear, read and record things about other people that are not normally discussed outside the health-care setting, and have privileged access to matters of patient privacy. This brings with it certain legal and moral obligations. Therefore, managing information about patients is one of the most important ethical and legal roles nurses play in health care and, owing to modern technology (as we discuss below), it is arguably one of the greatest challenges faced by professional practice.