Communication privacy management theory, and who co-owns a chat
Sandra Petronio's theory says telling someone your private information makes it co-owned. A chat export is one co-owner moving the whole record alone.
Communication privacy management theory holds that private information is owned, that telling someone makes it co-owned, and that disruption follows when the co-owners never agreed a rule for passing it on. Sandra Petronio named that disruption boundary turbulence. Exporting a two person chat is a case of it in the theory’s own terms: one co-owner moves the whole record, and the rule for moving it was never negotiated.
Petronio built the theory for spoken disclosure between people who know each other. Its unit is not the secret but the boundary around it, and a boundary can have more than one person standing inside. That is why it has something exact to say about a file that carries two people’s messages.
Private information gets a second owner the moment it is told
The theory’s book length statement is Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure, published by State University of New York Press in October 2002, with a foreword by Irwin Altman. The publisher’s page puts the central move in one sentence: in addition to owning our own private information, we also take on the responsibility of guarding other people’s private information when it is put into our trust.
A theory of disclosure can stop at how much a person reveals, and in what order. This one starts after the disclosure has happened and asks a different question: who holds the information now, and what are they allowed to do with it. The answer it gives is that both people hold it, whether or not either of them has thought about that.
The earlier version of the idea appeared in 1991, in an article Petronio titled “Communication boundary perspective: A model of managing the disclosure of private information between marital couples”, in the journal Communication Theory. That reference appears in the reference list of a later Petronio chapter; the scan of that chapter is an older one, and its volume and page numbers are not legible, so they are not given here. By 2012 Petronio, Dicorcia and Duggan were describing the approach, in the abstract recorded on its PubMed entry, as a perspective that emerged from a 35-year research program investigating how people regulate and control information they consider private and confidential.
Petronio’s six principles, in the order they happen
A 2009 chapter by Petronio and Jennifer Reierson, published in Afifi and Afifi’s collection on disclosure decisions and hosted as a scan by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, sets out the process as six principles. The chapter is about confidentiality rather than about files, and the principles are stated there in this sequence.
People believe they own their private information, and that belief sets what counts as private.
Because they believe they own it, they believe they have the right to control it.
To control how it moves, they use privacy rules built from criteria that matter to them.
Once they tell someone, the nature of the information changes: it becomes co-owned by the confidant.
Once it is co-owned, the parties ideally negotiate collectively held and agreed rules for passing it to third parties.
Because people do not consistently, effectively or actively negotiate those rules, boundary turbulence becomes possible, meaning disruptions in the way co-owners control and regulate the flow of the information to third parties.
Two published statements of the same theory do not count the same way, and the difference is worth knowing if you are trying to cite it. The 2002 book’s own table of contents does not list six principles. It lists five theoretical suppositions, named there as private information, privacy boundaries, control and ownership, a rule based management system, and privacy management dialectics, and then three privacy rule management processes: privacy rule foundations, boundary coordination operations, and boundary turbulence. The six principles in the 2009 chapter compress the same material and front load the ownership claim. Neither list is wrong; they are the same theory stated at different lengths, and a page that quotes one as the definitive count is quoting a version rather than the theory.
Boundary rules: who may be linked in, how far, and on whose authority
When information is co-owned, the theory says coordinating the boundary takes three operations, and names them as negotiating privacy rules for linkages, for permeability, and for ownership. The 2002 book devotes a chapter to the same three, under the headings boundary linkages, boundary permeability and boundary ownership, followed by a section on co-ownership and private disclosure confidants.
Linkages, in the 2009 chapter’s words, are the mutually agreed privacy rules used to choose others who might be privy to the collectively held information. Permeability is rule coordination about the extent to which a collectively held boundary is opened or closed once it has been formed. Ownership is the degree and kind of ownership each co-owner assumes, and the rights that come with it. The chapter also notes a difficulty that has nothing to do with bad faith: because people manage many privacy boundaries at once, it is sometimes hard to know where one boundary ends and another begins.
Those three operations are, as it happens, exactly the three questions a chat export raises. A linkage question: who else now has access, including the companies behind whatever service receives the file. A permeability question: the whole thread, or a chosen part of it. An ownership question: who decided, and on what authority. A group thread multiplies the first two without changing the third.
What boundary turbulence names, and why an export is a plain case of it
Boundary turbulence, in the 2009 chapter, is the disruption that occurs when co-owners do not negotiate rules and the flow of information to third parties stops being jointly controlled. The chapter is careful that turbulence can be the product of intentional or unintentional breaches alike, and that either way the confidant relationship is compromised and needs repair work. It cites Petronio’s own 1991 and 2004 work for that last point.
The counting problem shows up here too. The 2002 book’s contents list six types of boundary turbulence: intentional rule violations, boundary rule mistakes, fuzzy boundaries, dissimilar boundary orientations, boundary definition predicaments, and privacy dilemmas. The 2009 chapter, narrowed to confidentiality, names three categories of violation instead: discrepancy breaches of privacy, privacy ownership violations, and preemptive privacy control. The first two are descriptions of a breach; the third is a description of what people do when they expect one.
A discrepancy breach, as the chapter defines it, is when the expectations an original owner held about how their private information would be handled do not match the way co-owners actually regulate third party access, or the way others gain access and become intentional or unintentional co-owners. A privacy ownership violation is when a person’s ability to exercise ownership and control according to their own assumptions about the rules is overridden. Preemptive privacy control is the opposite motion: setting up thick boundary walls that prevent disclosure in the first place, or testing a person before granting access.
An export sits squarely inside the first two definitions, and the theory’s own framing of confidentiality explains why. The 2009 chapter’s stated contribution is to see confidentiality as a partnership between original owners and co-owners, built on mutual responsibilities and on rules for regulating the flow to others. A partnership in which one partner moves the asset is the condition the theory describes.
A chat export is one co-owner acting alone
A two person thread, in the theory’s terms, is a collective boundary with two co-owners and, almost always, no negotiated rule for third party dissemination. The rule is missing not because anyone refused it but because nobody writes one. Principle five says the parties ideally negotiate it. Principle six exists because they usually do not.
Exporting the thread does all three coordination operations at once, and does them unilaterally. It creates a linkage, because a third party now has access. It sets permeability, because the person exporting chooses the whole thread or a slice of it. It exercises ownership, because one co-owner made the decision. Comparing what different services do with a chat that has someone else in it is a question about the first operation; it does not touch the third.
There is one way the export is unlike the cases the theory was built on, and it runs against the exporter. The theory’s examples are retellings, where the confidant chooses the words and so absorbs part of the disclosure into their own account of it. A text or JSON export is not a retelling: it carries the other person’s sentences as they typed them. Masking can change who the recipient is able to name, which is a linkage effect, and what masking does and does not remove is worth reading on its own; it does not reduce how much of the thread is in the file.
One more thing the theory makes visible once you hold it against a thread: the two roles it separates are not separable here. The original owner is whoever first told something, and the confidant is whoever received it. In a conversation those roles swap on nearly every turn, so each person is the original owner of some lines and the co-owner of others, and the whole arrangement sits in one file. Petronio’s observation that it is hard to know where one boundary ends and another begins is doing a lot of work in a chat log.
What the written record cannot settle
Every one of the theory’s turbulence categories turns on an expectation. A discrepancy breach is defined by what the original owner anticipated. A privacy ownership violation is defined by the assumptions a person held about the rules. A chat log records neither. It records what was said, which is the one part of this that was never in question.
So the theory can tell you that an unnegotiated rule is the normal case, and it can give you the vocabulary for the three decisions an export makes. It cannot tell you what either person in a particular thread expected, because nobody wrote that down, and no tool that reads the thread can recover it. The general limits of reading a conversation after the fact apply here with no exception.
Applying the theory to file exports is also a reading, not a finding. None of the sources used on this page studies exports. Petronio’s cases are spoken disclosure in families, friendships, workplaces and care settings, and the 2009 chapter is specifically about confidentiality. The terms transfer cleanly, which is why they are useful, but a clean transfer of terms is not evidence about exports and is not presented as any.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently asked questions
What is communication privacy management theory?
It is a theory of how people decide what private information to reveal and what to hold back, built on the claim that private information is owned and that telling someone makes it co-owned. Sandra Petronio developed it, and its book length statement is Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure, published by State University of New York Press in 2002. It describes privacy as a boundary that people coordinate with rules, rather than as a quantity of secrecy.
Who created communication privacy management theory?
Sandra Petronio. The earlier version appeared in 1991 as an article on managing the disclosure of private information between marital couples, in the journal Communication Theory, and the full statement is the 2002 book. A 2012 abstract by Petronio with Mark Dicorcia and Ashley Duggan describes the perspective as the product of a 35-year research program.
What does boundary turbulence mean?
It means a disruption in the way co-owners of private information control and regulate how that information flows to third parties. Petronio and Reierson write that it can follow intentional or unintentional breaches alike, and that either way the confidant relationship is compromised and needs repair work. The 2002 book’s contents name six types of it; the 2009 chapter, narrowed to confidentiality, names three categories of violation.
Does the theory say I own a chat I am part of?
The theory is about what people believe and expect, not about law, and it makes no legal claim. Its first principle is that people believe they own their private information; its fourth is that once they tell someone, the information becomes co-owned by the person they told. Applied to a thread that means both people hold it, in the theory’s sense of holding. Nothing here is legal advice, and a separate question is what a court could compel from a service.
Is exporting a chat that someone else is in boundary turbulence?
In the theory’s terms it is a case of one co-owner regulating third party access without a negotiated rule, which is the condition the theory calls turbulence. The theory was not written about file exports and none of the work cited here tests it on them, so that is an application of its vocabulary rather than a tested finding. What the export actually reaches, and who, is a separate and checkable question.
The theory’s contribution here is small and exact: it gives the file you are holding a second owner.
Your conversations, read the way you would read someone else’s.
Portraitor takes a chat export you already have, anonymises it in your browser, and returns a structured reading of how you come across. Identifying details are removed in your browser before anything is sent.
See how it works →- Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of Privacy: Dialectics of Disclosure. State University of New York Press.
- Petronio, S. & Reierson, J. (2009). Regulating the privacy of confidentiality: Grasping the complexities through communication privacy management theory. In T. A. Afifi & W. A. Afifi (Eds.), Uncertainty, Information Management, and Disclosure Decisions (pp. 365 to 383). Routledge.
- Petronio, S., Dicorcia, M. J. & Duggan, A. (2012). The Permanente Journal, 16(4), 41 to 45. Title and abstract on the linked PubMed record.