Distinction Between Privacy And Personal Information

In the rapid development of the information society, increasingly frequent trading makes the flow of information growing, personal information has exceeded the original narrow barriers entering into the public view. Meanwhile, the value of property of personal information is not only becoming increasingly prominent, the chance of being illegal use also increases significantly. Unfortunately, the personal information protection law system has not been established, in particular is still very incomplete in civil fields.Moreover, the circumstances intruding one’s peaceful life caused by the disclosure of personal information such as spam messages abound. But the uncertainty of the connotation of privacy makes such a situation still a problem on the identification of legal nature. This not only makes the relationship between privacy and personal information ambiguous, but also makes it difficult to unify referee standards in judicial practice. This paper is committed to distinguish the concept of privacy and personal information and define the extension of both based on the introduction of foreign practices, combined with our legal tradition and reality, in order to explore a reasonable protection path of personal information. This paper is divided into four parts:The first part is the basic theory of privacy and personal information. The essay introduces the concept, features and basic classification of both on the basis of comparisons. First, the concept of privacy mainly exists three doctrinal controversy, namely, "the information says", "the information and peaceful life says", "the private sphere says", the range of the three theories gets more and more wide in a progressive way. Personal information, in short, means a body of identifiable subject information associated with the specific individuals. Secondly, in terms of both features, the privacy consists of the three following features: private and non-openness, deductive and historical development. Personal information has the characters of identifiable, morphological diversity and objectivity. Finally, privacy can be divided into three categories, including the privacy of the secret, private and personal areas according to the "field theory".There are also some scholars proposing other privacy form including information privacy, tranquility privacy and space privacy. Personal information can be divided into direct and indirect personal information, sensitive personal information and trivial personal information, public information and secrete information.The second part is devoted to discuss the necessity and possibility about distinguishing privacy and personal information.The necessity includes both theory and practice. In particular, the necessity to distinguish theoretically can be understood from three aspects:(1) a disagreement on the relationship between the privacy and personal information from the view of comparative law;(2) the misunderstanding of privacy connotation by domestic theory;(3) based on the considerations about relevant legal principles. The necessity to distinguish in practice proceeds from the interests hybridity on the existence morphological and different demands on legal remedy of both. The possibilities stretch from non-conformance of the law nature and differences in the internal structure.The third section discusses some theoretical issues on the distinction between privacy and personal information,including the distinction basis, the relevant logical paradox, as well as the extension definition of privacy and personal information.The distinction basis mainly starts from the value aspect, including value orientation of legislative protection, the degree of legal protection under different value forms, mechanisms associated rights and human dignity. Logical paradox mainly unfolds from the non-normality of overlapping rights and the legislative principle of keeping the order of arrival. Finally, as to the extension of privacy and personal information of judgment, the article defines the extension of privacy in the information form, personal information is limited to the non-private information section, the judgment on privacy depends on the "reasonable expectation standards of privacy."The fourth part is the pattern design on legislating to protect the rights and interests of the personal information. The article first analyzes several views and shortcomings, then points out that the legislation should select the mode of personality rights, and defines the rights and interests of personal information as a concrete personality rights.