A colleague of mine had an excellent PhD project and she published good papers during her PhD. When I asked her to give me her PhD thesis, she told me she can't because her PhD project was confidential (commercial, military, ...).
I wonder if a PhD thesis can be confidential? Isn't it available in her university library?
Can a funding organization set this limitation for the data included in a PhD thesis?
Anyway, what if her future employer asks for her PhD thesis?
There are two ways that a PhD can have restricted access.
First, many people will pay to keep access to their thesis restricted so that they can try to publish it. The policies vary depending on the company the university uses to publish the theses. Usually, however, the time is 3 years or less.
Second, the government can classify the thesis in part or in whole. This happens when something discovered or revealed in the thesis is considered to be a matter of national security. Even though the information may not have originally been classified, and your friend may not even have access to classified material, in many countries—and certainly the U.S.—the government retains the right to restrict information through the classification process ex post of any information that it deems threatening to national security. The level of classification depends upon the level of threat, and your friend could be subject to legal repercussions from sharing that information with you.
This can certainly happen. I sometimes "supervise" M.Sc. theses at my employer. (The "academic" supervision is done by a professor at a university, of course, but I'll do the day-to-day supervision, and the student will usually sit at a desk in a cubicle close to me.)
Usually these theses involve my employer's Intellectual Property. Usually the student uses data from a client (and retailers are utterly paranoid about their sales data). Consequently, we need to have both our clients and our own legal department on board with this, and usually this means that all or part of the thesis will not be publicly accessible. Of course, the department and the student in question needs to be OK with this, too, but we haven't had any problems with this so far.
The supervising professors will then need to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Again, I have never seen a professor balk at this. They usually leap at the chance of having one of their students do a thesis in industry.
You ask: "what if her future employer asks for her PhD thesis?" Simple. The same thing happens if a prospective employer asks me about samples of my work at a previous employer, which I cannot disclose because of an NDA. I tell them that I have signed an NDA and cannot go into details, then give a rough sketch of what I can talk about. This is commonplace in the workplace, and no serious employer should bat an eye. (Even a future academic employer should be understanding.)
This might work differently for a Ph.D. thesis, where you actually expect to generate publications, which will usually be the exception for M.Sc. theses. However, I'd expect that it would be possible to have parts of a Ph.D. thesis not available to the public, again with NDAs. And if the industry partner pays part of the Ph.D. student's salary, I'd expect most professors to be happy with the arrangement, assuming a good relationship between the professor and the industry partner.
