I have been asked to discuss privacy of information, whether information about past law cases should be available to the general public or medical and police records. Should companies be allowed to collect information, peoples address etc.There are a number of databases of information available to the public; an example of one is AustLII (http://www.austlii.edu.au/databases.html), which is a site that has all information about past cases and a search engine to make it even easier to find out what you want to know about someone. This is good and bad for a number of reasons, sometimes people might have something they did once that they are not too proud of, or they are trying to change.This is un-fair to people wanting to hire employees or getting new clients. This is unfair because it is like hiding something from someone. If a doctor was to get a new patient and they wanted to check the history of the new patient and it was blocked or something and the patients history was not accessible because you know the patient has blocked it then you would be quite suspicious as to why. You would want to know as much about the kind of people you are hiring as well because you don't want to hire someone that has a history of ripping off the employers.I studied a case of sexual harassment that I freely found on the internet (http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/qld/QCA/1999/20.html) and the person sewing (The Plaintiff) the Defendant would probably have less of a chance getting a job where a male is the boss because she has had a sexual harassment case before. The reason that she would find it harder to find a job than someone else is because if the person hiring them was to look at their history, they could find out that she had a history of suing people for sexual harassment and wouldn't like to take the chance of being sued themselves.In conclusion, I think that people's records should be accessible to some degree; they should not be recorded on an Internet site as easily accessible as the one I used. Some things like law cases however, should be available to the public as these are things that people have a right to know.
