M.MSc.(Med.), Bioethics and Health Law, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, 2011 / Keeping information a patient has given in confidence to his or her doctor is a fundamental value in each individual doctorpatient relationship. However, when a medical professional is faced with disclosing confidential information in the face of competing public interests (or other ethically compelling reasons) he or she faces an ethical dilemma. In the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa, the dilemma to keep medical confidences or to disclose information to identifiable third parties is frequently faced by doctors and other healthcare professionals. This research report highlights the duty of medical confidentiality identifying its importance both as an ‘absolute’ principle in healthcare practice as well as suggesting that there are contexts in which it should be considered as a relative duty. In keeping, this format of this research report will present current data concerning the HIV/AIDS epidemic, interrogate the idea of medical confidentiality, explore some professional guidelines associated with HIV/AIDS disclosure, as well as raise some ethical– legal considerations concerning healthcare professionals and the problem of disclosure of their patient’s HIV positive status to identifiable third parties.

Les applications des réseaux sociaux (OSN) permettent aux utilisateurs de toutes les âges de partager facilement une large série des contenus confidentiels ou privés avec un nombre théoriquement illimité de partenaires. Cet avantage peut être obtenu au risque des problèmes de sécurité et de l'exposition de la vie privée pour les utilisateurs, puisque dans toutes les OSN existantes, afin de soutenir un modèle d'affaires prometteur, les informations des utilisateurs sont collectées et stockées de façon permanente par le fournisseur de service, qui devient potentiellement un "Big Brother" capable d'exploiter ces informations de plusieurs façons qui peuvent violer la vie privée des utilisateurs individuels ou groupes d'utilisateurs. La thèse propose et valide une nouvelle approche pour ces problèmes de sécurité et de confidentialité. Afin d'assurer la confidentialité des utilisateurs face à les violations potentiels de la vie privée par le fournisseur, ce modèle adopte une architecture distribuée en s'appuyant sur la coopération entre un certain nombre de parties indépendantes qui sont aussi les utilisateurs de l'application de réseau social. Le deuxième point fort de l'approche suggérée est de s'appuyer sur les relations de confiance qui font partie des réseaux sociaux dans la vie réelle afin d’affronter le problème de la création de mécanismes de confiance en préservant la vie privée. Sur la base de ces principes de conception, un nouveau réseau social en ligne distribuée, appelé Safebook, a été proposé: Safebook s'appuie sur la confiance dans la vie réelle et permet aux utilisateurs de maintenir le contrôle sur l'accès et l'utilisation de leurs propres informations. / Online Social Network (OSN) applications allow users of all ages and educational background to easily share a wide range of personal information with a theoretically unlimited number of partners. This advantage comes at the cost of increased security and privacy exposures for users, since in all existing OSN applications, to underpin a promising business model, users' data is collected and stored permanently at the databases of the service provider, which potentially becomes a “Big Brother” capable of exploiting this data in many ways that can violate the privacy of individual users or user groups. This thesis suggests and validates a new approach to tackle these security and privacy problems. In order to ensure users' privacy in the face of potential privacy violations by the provider, the suggested approach adopts a distributed architecture relying on cooperation among a number of independent parties that are also the users of the online social network application. The second strong point of the suggested approach is to capitalize on the trust relationships that are part of social networks in real life in order to cope with the problem of building trusted and privacy-preserving mechanisms as part of the online application. Based on these main design principles, a new distributed Online Social Network, namely Safebook, is proposed: Safebook leverages on real life trust and allows users to maintain the control on the access and the usage of their own data. The prototype of Safebook is available at www.safebook.eu.

Noninterference is a technique to formally capture the intuitive notion of information flow in the context of security. Information does not flow from one agent to another if the actions of the first have no impact on the future observations of the second. Various formulations of this notion have been proposed based on state machines and the removal of actions from action sequences. A new model known as the concurrent game structure [CGS] has recently been introduced for analysis multi-agent systems. We propose an alternate formulation of noninterference defined for systems modeled by CGS's and analyze the impact of the new approach on noninterference research based on existing definitions.

Confidentiality is considered an integral component of medical practise, yet there has been debate within the medical community as to whether there should be exceptions to the obligation to protect patient’s confidences. In the cases involving medical patients with deadly sexually transmittable disease like HIV/AIDS, physicians feel caught between two basic principles – keeping of medical confidentiality and public safety. Bioethicists would favour breaking of confidentiality when the public safety and the life of someone are endangered. However, considering the complexities and discrimination in connection with HIV/AIDS in Nigerian context, many would be tempted to discourage the notification of partners who risk being infected, through the moral obligation of 'duty to warn', but some others would argue that not notifying people of such threat to life would only help in spreading the virus to ignorant partners of an index patient. I argued that there is an overridden utilitarian principle to save others from harm, but some others cite the negative effects the breaking of medical confidentiality would have on the healthcare system as a reason not to favour partner notification. Nevertheless, people would appreciate the value of breaching confidentiality in HIV/AIDS related cases when various forms of discrimination and stigmatisations are criminalised and policies to protect the fundamental rights of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) are strictly adhered to.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2002. / "May 2002." Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-101). Also available online.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Zululand, 2008. / Confidentiality is an essential tool in a therapeutic relationship, thus, the focus of this study was based on the views and experiences of intern psychologists and registered psychologists on the concept of confidentiality in a therapeutic relationship. The researcher selected ten participants, of which four were intern psychologists and six were registered psychologists. A qualitative research method of collecting data was used in a form of an open-ended questionare. This questionare was consitituted of two quastions which formulated vignettes of participants. A phenomenomenological approach was adopted in this study to facilitate the understanding of the information gathered. The findings from the present study indicated that confidentiality in a therapeutic relationship is a confusing stance. There was a strong view that confidentiality leaves psychologists in a dilemma especially where there is conflict of interest. This was noted to be of significance that the participants believed that the clients they serve are their first priority. It was also found in this study that the lawyer-client relationship is protected as compared to a client-psychologist relationship. This study concluded with a brief discussion on the limitations of the study and recommendations of future research.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

The development of HIV counselling has been one of the major public policy innovations in response to the challenges posed by HIV and AIDS in Britain. This research, using a participative and qualitative methodology, examines how HIV counsellors have conceptualised their approach to the ethical issues associated with their innovatory role. The research takes an overview of two separate phases of fieldwork conducted in 1990 and 1994. The first phase concentrated on establishing the background of self-identified HIV counsellors and how they related to the wider counselling movement which had already developed a distinctive ethic founded on respect for individual autonomy. Their general identification with the wider counselling movement raised issues how this ethic could govern their work with clients affected by HIV. The second phase concentrated on the management of confidentiality within multidisciplinary teams. The results of the research are set within the wider ethical and socio-historical context of AIDS policy development in Britain and explore changes in how HIV counsellors conceptualise ethical issues in the local context of their work. The methodology is that of `descriptive ethical inquiry' accompanied by examination of how this type of inquiry relates to moral philosophy and social sciences. The method of participative research adopted is consultative and careful consideration is given to how this type of research relates to comparable procedures used in the production of professional codes of ethics.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Morgan State University's iNET effort is aimed at improving existing telemetry networks by developing more efficient operation and cost effectiveness. This paper develops an enhanced security architecture for the iNET environment in order to protect the network from both inside and outside adversaries. This proposed architecture addresses the key security components of confidentiality, integrity and authentication. The security design for iNET is complicated by the unique features of the telemetry application. The addition of encryption is complicated by the need for robust synchronization needed for real time operation in a high error environment.