Community health team confidentiality policy
If you contact us about a problem, it’s important to us that we don’t use the information in a way you don’t want or intend. Occasionally, however, there are some constraints on what we will keep confidential due to legal considerations and risks of serious danger.
If you’re unsure, we encourage you to ask us any questions you have about confidentiality before you share sensitive information with us. You can do this via our (anonymous) form, or at any stage of communication with us.
This policy is effective from August 11, 2024. If we make changes to our policy in future, they will be documented here.
We take confidentiality seriously
We regularly handle cases where people want a high level of confidentiality, and we respect that. We think it’s very important that people have options for discussing sensitive situations.
When you bring us information, we’ll typically have a conversation about any requests you have about what happens next. Some common preferences:
- You don’t want us to share any details that might identify you or others involved, even with other people on the Community Health team
- You are ok with us sharing with other people on our team, but don’t want information shared further
- It’s important to you that the person/people you’ve experienced a problem with doesn’t know that you spoke to us
- You are ok with the person/people you’ve experienced a problem with having a certain summary of the type of concern
- You don’t think any steps should be taken unless there are additional complaints
- You think certain steps should be taken as a result of your information, and are okay with information being shared on a need-to-know basis to allow these steps to occur
- Or something else.
Note that a higher level of confidentiality does limit what steps we can take. For example, in some cases there’s little or no action we can take without investigating further, or without the person realizing who likely spoke to us. In cases where we think it would help reduce the risk of further problems, we might ask you if you’re ok with us taking more steps, but we’ll follow your wishes if you say no.
In the history of the team since 2015, we’ve made a few mistakes on confidentiality. Some were because we didn’t explicitly discuss what level of confidentiality a person wanted, and we misunderstood what they expected. Julia Wise describes two mistakes here.
Limits to when we’ll keep information confidential
Multiple sources
Sometimes multiple people share information about the same situation with us. If some want it kept confidential and others are ok with sharing, we may decide to share the information that came from people who are ok with sharing.
Risk of serious harm
If we thought someone were in serious danger, we might try to reduce that danger. For example, if you tell us you're planning to physically hurt someone, we might try to warn them and / or notify the authorities. This might require us to use information you gave us in a way you didn’t want. So far since the team began its work in 2015, we’ve done this once.
Legal requirements
Our team is currently part of CEA, which is a project of EV. Situations where we might need to share information to others at CEA or EV:
- A situation where someone is in physical danger;
- Misconduct that happens in-person in an EV space, such as a conference or office run by EV;
- A complaint about a potential crime or other serious misconduct by someone associated with effective altruism or EV.
- If the person works or volunteers for EV, EV might decide to take disciplinary action even if that’s not what you request. They would try not to reveal the identity of who raised the problem, but in some cases that won’t be possible. They may also need to report the situation to external authorities in some circumstances, for example telling the UK Charity Commission if there is a serious concern about an EV trustee.
- This could apply if the person was associated with EA or EV in the past, or becomes associated with EA in the future, even if they weren’t at the time of the misconduct.
- A complaint about misconduct (such as harassment) where the victim is an EV person (employees, contractors, trustees of EV, or people while they are volunteering for an EV project), or was an EV person at the time of the misconduct.
- If you’re not sure if someone is an EV person, we can look that up, and you can then decide whether to share more details. (See below for how to ask us to look someone up.)
We may need to discuss the outline of the situation with the EV legal team to understand whether any of the above applies, though we will try to minimize the amount of information we share to achieve this. In practice, when we run the outline of a case past the legal team, it’s very rare that the legal team asks us for identifying information. As of August 2024, the EV legal team is made of four lawyers; they want to preserve privacy wherever possible.
Other times we might need to share information externally to EV:
- If a legal authority, like a court or government agency, requires us to share information. This might be connected to a lawsuit (either a lawsuit about our work, or about some other issue our records are relevant to) or to an official inquiry or investigation (such as reports about safeguarding which are required under UK law, or a US state attorney general initiating a nonprofit compliance investigation).
- If we need to share information to comply with the law, including data privacy laws and UK safeguarding laws. For example, we might need to share information with UK regulators (such as the Charity Commission) to comply with UK safeguarding laws.
- Potentially some other extenuating circumstance we haven’t anticipated.
Julia is not functioning as a social worker in her work in effective altruism. She doesn’t have an additional requirement to report concerns, even though she’s licensed as a social worker, unless you specifically tell her “I’m telling you this because you’re a social worker” and tell her about abuse or neglect of a person under 18, over 60, or with an intellectual disability.
Note that the above list may not be exhaustive, and there may be other legal situations where we need to disclose information.
As far as we’re aware, only once in our team’s history since 2015 has EV shared private information gathered via our team for legal reasons (and in that case, all the people whose information was shared consented to that sharing).
Finding out whether someone is an employee, contractor, or trustee of EV:
- A list of most EV projects is here. There are also a few other individuals who work for EV.
- Let's say, for example, you want to tell us about a problem you experienced from Jane Smith. You're not sure if Jane works for EV, and if she does, you might not want to give us more information because you're wary about HR or legal getting involved. You can check if someone works for EV without asking a caseworker, by emailing Lisanne who does assistant work for our team. She won’t pass on the names she checks.
- Email Lisanne at lisanne.vandenbosch@centreforeffectivealtruism.org. You can do this from a throwaway email address if you’d like to remain anonymous.
- You can give her ‘Jane's’ name (and also some other names if you want to obscure the trail) and ask her to check if they work for EV. She'll reply to let you know whether Jane works for EV.
- If you contact Lisanne, you should ONLY give names and no other information.
- You can also separately talk to a caseworker (Catherine, Charlotte, or Julia) about "if someone who works for EV did X, is that the kind of thing you'd tell HR or legal about?" You can also contact them using a throwaway email address if you wish.
- In these cases, please share only non-identifying details if you do not want to make a report.
- If you learn that Jane does work for EV, and that the problem is one that we would need to tell HR or legal about, maybe you'd decide not to tell us details.
We hope this puts you in a better position to decide whether to bring us information about a problem.