This blog is focused on the theory of Communication Privacy
Management (which will be commonly referred to as CPM for the rest of the
blog), which was created by Sandra Petronio in 1991. This theory focuses on the
importance of knowing the appropriate channels, people and times to disclose
information. Petronio’s theory is seen as a management system and is contains
three main fragments: privacy ownership, privacy control and privacy
turbulence. Petronio describes these as,
·
Privacy Ownership is the boundaries we set up to
encompass our information that we do not disclose to others. The boundaries set
up by an individual can range from easily broken, information we are more
likely to share with others, to impenetrable, information we keep secret to
ourselves.
·
Privacy Control is the decision making process
one goes through when deciding what information we disclose, when we disclose
it and who we disclose it to. These decisions often reflect or affect our
boundaries in Privacy Ownership.
·
Privacy Turbulence is when our control and
ownership of our privacy boundaries are violated or do not go the way we had
planned. This can be a friend who let’s your secret slip or an email gets sent to
the wrong person, etc. The decisions you make post-turbulence are also a factor
in reducing turbulence in general.
There are five principles of CPM; the first four handle
privacy ownership and privacy control, the fifth works with privacy turbulence:
“1. People believe they own and have a right to control their private
information. 2. People control their private information through the use of
personal privacy rules. 3. When others are told or given access to a person’s
private information, they become co-owners of that information. 4. Co-owners of
private information need to negotiate mutually agreeable privacy rules about
telling others. 5. When co-owners of private information don’t effectively
negotiate and follow mutually held privacy rules, boundary turbulence is the
likely result” (Griffin, Ledbetter,
& Sparks, 2015, p. 150).
There are a few terms that will come up in the following blog
posts, these include: private information
which is the information that can be potentially disclosed or owned, privacy which is the feeling of
ownership that individuals have over their private information, rule-based theory is the “…theory that
assumes we can best understand people’s freely chosen actions if we study the
system of rules they use to interpret and manage their lives” (Griffin et al., 2015, p. 153).
This theory has to do with the second principle “People control their private
information through the use of personal privacy rules” (Griffin et al., 2015, p. 151), and
it can differ between gender, culture, motivation, context and the risk/benefit
ration of the situation. A collective
privacy boundary is the intersection of privacy boundaries of co-owners of
private information. A mutual privacy
boundary is the synchronization of the collective privacy boundaries
negotiated by the group. There are two types of confidant; a reluctant one
and a deliberate one. In terms of
turbulence, an important term to know is confidentiality
dilemma, which is when a confidant must choose between keeping a collective
secret, and breaching the privacy boundary for the good of the original owner’s
wellbeing. (Griffin et al., 2015,
Chapter 12)
The remainder of this blog
will use videos, real-world examples and studies done in the realm of CPM to
further investigate and describe the many facets of Petronio’s theory.
