Communication Privacy Management: An overview

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.