The paper extends previous accounts of informational
privacy as a contextual notion. Where previous
accounts have focused on interpretations of the privacy
context itself as being contextual and open for negotiation
and interpretation, this paper extends those analyses and
shows that personal information itself is in fact best
understood as contextual and situational—and as such open
for interpretation. The paper reviews the notion of information
as it has been applied in informational privacy and
philosophy of information, and suggests that personal
information ought to be regarded as communicative acts.
The paper suggests a reconceptualization of informational
privacy from having its focus on controlling, limiting, and
restricting access to material carriers of information to a
focus on a regulation of the use, analysis, and interpretation
of personal information.