Abstract

In Chile, the means of electronic communication used by public officials, especially e-mail, do not have an adequate and specific regulation on their public disclosure regime. For this reason, conflicts over their use have had to be resolved by jurisprudence, weighing fundamental rights with different results depending on the venue and time. The conflicting rights are primarily the right to information and access to public information, on the one hand, and privacy and inviolability of private communications, on the other, whose contents and limits (used to give primacy to reserve or publicity) are analyzed and systematized in this work. Finally, a regulatory and practical solution to the problem is proposed.