The article is an attempt to analyse the relationship between private security enterprises and citizens. Explored is what access to safety information has the user of guarded premises. The paper examined the regulations of private security firms and the requirements of keeping available monitoring records. The article reviews records of interviews with employees and managers, in which their work were discussed. The material used in this article are the result of controlled experiments carried out by a student research group operating within the framework of project NCN Opus 5 and headed by prof. Jolanta Jabłońska-Bonca. Under an established scenario, in which students took on different roles, the group were able to study the tendency of security personnel to disclose information related to their work. Parts of the conversations referred to in the text have been anonymised. The authentic spelling was retained to reflect in full a profile of a given worker and to give the reader an opportunity to perceive the atmosphere of the interviewing process.

Academics and faculty members are entangled in many interests. Selfless science for cognitive purposes is a thing of the past. There is a constant game of the power over knowledge. Apart from scientists, many entities with various interests are participants of the game. They are: politicians, officials, academic administration, research sponsors, accreditation agencies, publishers, resort scientific institutes, industry, business. The scientists themselves sometimes work for the truth and sometimes they work for profit; they create knowledge which is public property, or when they are employed commercially, e.g. by the industry, they create private knowledge. This paper presents five factors which may contribute to restricting the cognitive autonomy of the scientists.