Confidence breach

When your application is refused you may have a right to seek an Administrative Review | Judicial Review or lodge an appeal. Our Administrative Review lawyers in London are the ones to help you. Please do note that you will have limited time to seek an Administrative Review or lodge an Appeal, so it is best you act quickly.

Confidence Breach Experts

You don’t need to have all your evidence ready as you will be given time to gather your documents ready for the appeal hearing, which is likely to take place several months later.

Confidence breach law

What is breach of confidence?

Breach of confidence is a common law tort which allows individuals or businesses to go to civil court to protect secret or commercially sensitive information. The law aims to prevent people to whom the information has been divulged in confidence from using it to gain an unfair benefit.

Confidential information
For information to be shown to be confidential and to establish that a breach of confidence has occurred, it needs to be shown that:

  • The information has the necessary quality of confidence;
  • It was imparted in a manner which imposed an obligation of confidence;
  • There has been an unauthorized use of the information to the detriment of the owner.
  • A breach of confidentiality can arise in a number of situations where the confidential information has been divulged to a third party to the detriment of the owner, including where the information involved:
  • Trade secrets;
  • Government secrets;
  • Private personal information;
  • Professional relationships.

The quality of the information

When secret information is dealt with in a commercial setting it is usually the case that an obligation of confidence is enforced by an express contractual provision. These are called non-disclosure agreements and are a standard business practice across many different fields.

If the obligation of confidence is not expressly provided, there will in certain cases be an implied duty of confidence. An example of where this would arise is in an employment setting, as employees are considered to owe an implied duty of confidence concerning trade secrets and such like to their employers.

Information may be supplied to a third party so that party can do a specific task; for example, personal information may be passed to an employee of a company so they can enter the data into the company computer system. If they were to do just that, this would be authorized use of the information.

If that person was to use the information for any other purpose, such as disclosing it to others, that would constitute an unauthorized use of the information and they would be found guilty of breach of confidence.

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