Abstract

There are times when two essential human rights may appear to be in conUlict, or need to be balanced against one another. This paper examines the right of a party, such as ofUicials, a group of people or an individual, to ‘privacy and conUidentiality’ when others may have a conUlicting ‘right to know’ about them. Although this conUlict has already been studied by other researchers, there is a lot of controversy about a rightful balance in new technology driven situations. I conducted a survey on the views of college students over an actual case of a university associate professor whose immoral conduct had been reported to a few of the faculty by a PhD student who had given birth to his child on the promise of marriage while the teacher was already married and had a child. I asked the students if they believed protecting the privacy of the teacher was more important than the school’s right to know. I also asked if they believed a child born to the single mother in such a relationship has the right to know about his father, or the single mother has the right to keep that information conUidential. Finally I asked the students if they believed in general that the ‘right to privacy and conUidentiality’ was more important than the ‘right to know’. This paper reports on the results of this survey on 222 students at an international university in Japan.