Open data are held to contribute to a wide variety of social and political goals, including strengthening transparency, public participation and democratic accountability, promoting economic growth and innovation, and enabling greater public sector efficiency and cost savings. However, releasing government data that contain personal information may threaten privacy and related rights and interests. In this Article we ask how these privacy interests can be respected, without unduly hampering benefits from disclosing public sector information. We propose a balancing framework to help public authorities address this question in different contexts. The framework takes into account different levels of privacy risks for different types of data. It also separates decisions about access and re-use, and highlights a range of different disclosure routes. A circumstance catalogue lists factors that might be considered when assessing whether, under which conditions, and how a dataset can be released. While open data remains an important route for the publication of government information, we conclude that it is not the only route, and there must be clear and robust public interest arguments in order to justify the disclosure of personal information as open data.

翻译：开放数据被认为有助于实现广泛的社会与政治目标，包括增强透明度、公众参与和民主问责，促进经济增长与创新，以及提升公共部门效率并节约成本。然而，发布包含个人信息的政府数据可能威胁隐私及相关权利与利益。本文探讨如何在不过度阻碍公共部门信息公开收益的前提下尊重这些隐私权益。我们提出一个平衡框架，以协助公共机构在不同情境下处理这一问题。该框架考虑了不同类型数据对应的不同隐私风险等级，同时区分了数据访问与再利用的决策，并强调了一系列不同的公开途径。情境目录列出了评估数据集是否、在何种条件下以及如何能够发布时可能考虑的因素。尽管开放数据仍是政府信息发布的重要途径，但我们认为这并非唯一途径，且必须存在清晰而有力的公共利益论证，才能将个人信息作为开放数据予以公开。