SSH. Before you read further, I must warn you that you are about to read about matters the judges would rather you didn’t know about. So please burn this before reading. Better still, forget you know I exist.

But if you want, like everyone else, to know exactly what it is you are not allowed to know, read on, unless you are on Twitter or attend Parliament, in which case you already know all there is to know.

Let me tell you about the convicted criminals including four child abusers who may or may not be living near you, but can’t be named, the company accused of pollution and the activities of various other major companies whose products you may or may not be buying, and… I’m sorry, but the paper’s lawyer has just reminded me I’m writing in a newspaper, not tweeting, and there are injunctions in force that stop me going any further unless I’m willing to go to jail, which I’m not.

Meanwhile, there is nothing to stop the people and companies who took out the injunctions doing whatever it is they want to do. Privacy injunctions aren’t just about footballers having extra-marital affairs. They are a well-used method by those with sufficient money to protect their public image from being defiled by their private reality.

When that private reality adversely affects the public in general, then personal or company embarrassment is not a reason for keeping the public in the dark.

I’m not interested in whether or not this or that international footballer has been cheating on his wife. That is a matter between the two of them and may she tell him exactly what she thinks of him.

However, if a sportsman makes a mini-fortune by promoting clothes or toiletries or sporting equipment with his squeaky-clean family-man public image when he is in real life a philandering rat, then he is a hypocrite who is deceiving the public for material gain and deserves to be unmasked. The companies that pay him the mini-fortune may also have something to say on the matter as Tiger Woods found out when his extra-marital affairs became public.

But the cheating sportsman with his squeaky-clean image is a minor problem compared to, for example, the company that may or may not be polluting the environment.

We don’t know and we can’t know because a judge believes the company’s commercial reputation is more important than our safety.

That can’t be right, especially if he made his decision based on the company’s version of events. Let me stress I don’t know whether the allegations are true or not. The company may be the subject of viciously malicious falsehoods by someone out to get it.

But the way to deal with those matters is to hear all sides of the argument and possibly test them in court, not to stop the media from telling the public about them.

If they are false, then the person who made them can be prosecuted and every news organisation that publishes them will face a libel suit for millions of pounds. If they are true, then the sooner they are revealed the better.

There may, just, be an argument for an injunction pending the outcome of a court case testing their veracity, but only if the injunction is severely time-limited and non-extendable to encourage the lawyers to finish the case and not let it drag into the next century.

Injunctions are a tool the unscrupulous rich and powerful can use to hide their activities and evade their responsibilities to the rest of us. It is time to remind judges of the importance of the public knowing the truth.