How do privacy and confidentiality differ in ethics?

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What distinguishes privacy from confidentiality is that privacy concerns individuals’ rights to control their personal information—who may access it, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Confidentiality is the obligation of the organization or professional who holds that information to protect it from disclosure, sharing it only with authorized people and for legitimate purposes. Ethically, respecting privacy means honoring a person’s autonomy and consent over their data, while maintaining confidentiality means upholding a duty of trust by safeguarding information they have disclosed. For example, you have a privacy interest in deciding what health information to share, and clinicians have a confidentiality duty to keep that information within the care team and not disclose it improperly. The idea that privacy and confidentiality are the same, or that privacy only concerns employment records, misses these distinct roles and duties.