## 4 Privacy and Open Government
### Finding the Right Balance: Public Personal Information  
The first privacy challenge is part of an overarching problem: how can the objectives of open government be balanced with privacy values? As noted earlier, data protection regimes are aimed, in part, at boosting citizen confidence or trust in government so as to enhance public participation. In this sense, at least, the protection of privacy would seem to match the goals of open government. Yet the transparency and accountability objectives of open government push towards greater disclosure of information in the hands of government, and it is here that there is the greatest tension between privacy and open government [31]. There is a large volume of personal information in the hands of government, and in some cases, principles of transparency and accountability require its disclosure. To what extent, though, do the demands for proactive disclosure of data in reusable formats create privacy risks for so-called \"public\" personal information. \"Public personal information\" is information about identifiable individuals that is in the hands of government, and that is mandated by law or regulation to be made public. It may include information about political campaign contributions, public servant salary information, building or renovation permits, land titles information, and so on. Perhaps because they have long been required to operate under the public eye, and because courts have a very long history of publishing the reasons for their decisions--which often contain detailed personal information--the judicial branch of government has had considerable experience with the challenges of balancing privacy with transparency and accountability. It has been suggested that the principle of open justice dates back to the Magna Carta [32], and is reflected in the U.S. in the First Amendment right of the public to have access to court proceedings [33]. In state constitutions it exists in the form of an open courts rule [32]. Information related to court proceedings is presumptively public, notwithstanding the fact that much of it may involve highly sensitive and personal information. In Canada, the open courts principle plays a similar role, with the Supreme Court of Canada describing it as \"necessary to maintaining the independence and impartiality of courts\" and \"integral to public confidence in the justice system and the public's understanding of the administration of justice\" [34] (paragraph 25). Because trials themselves are by default public, and because courts publish reasons for decisions that often contain a detailed recitation of key facts, in the context of the courts, we often see a level of disclosure of highly personal information that is not replicated elsewhere in government. It is instructive to consider some of the challenges that courts and administrative tribunals have faced with respect to the balance they strike between openness and privacy, particularly in the Internet age. Thus, in the U.S. and Canada, although court and tribunal reasons for decisions have always been considered public in nature, the ability to make these documents publicly available over the Internet, through court and tribunal websites, for example, has sparked controversy over whether the nature and quantity of personal information available in these documents should be made available on such a large, public and readily searchable scale [35, 36, 37]. This has prompted consideration of whether Internet publication is necessary or desirable to achieve the goals of transparency. Others have debated _what_ information in tribunal proceedings must be disclosed to ensure transparency, with some tribunals choosing to redact certain information before the online publication of decisions [35, 38]. The experience of courts and tribunals will be instructive in considering the balance between privacy on the one hand and transparency/accountability on the other when considering how to deal with \"public\" personal information in the context of open government.