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as opposed to a narrower right against them acquiring it by
unacceptable action. The acquisition of  personal information is
often an unavoidable or highly likely consequence of morally
permissible action. However, in some cases the routes or means
by which such knowledge is acquired may be intrusive and
impermissible. If we think of informational privacy rights in
terms of information content, rather than in terms of the actions
by which information may be acquired or communicated, we may
overlook the variety of entirely permissible sorts of action and
communication that may lead to the acquisition and possession of
 personal information.
Informational privacy and data protection 107
A focus on content encourages misleading analogies between
information and physical objects
A focus on informational content, rather than on communicative and
epistemic action, may lead us to think of informational privacy in
implausible, even incoherent, terms. The container/conduit model
encourages us to think of information as a kind of quasi-physical
stuff, and of bits of information as analogous to physical objects that
can be kept hidden or contained, or alternatively transferred and
moved around. But information and knowledge are in fact very
unlike physical stuff.
Suppose Peter leaves his diary open, and you unwittingly notice
that he has been diagnosed as having a terminal illness. You have
unwittingly acquired personal information. Now, had you acquired
the diary itself, you could rid yourself of it: you could put it back,
throw it away, or burn it: the diary is a material object. But it can be
hard, even impossible, to rid oneself of knowledge once possessed.
The fact that we speak of possessing or acquiring information is no
reason for ignoring the profound differences between communica-
tive and epistemic action and action that alters physical elements of
the material world.
Similarly, if we rely on the conduit metaphor, it is easy to cast
knowledge as the possession of something, perhaps most naturally as
the possession of information. But this risks downplaying two things.
First, we risk downplaying the fact that we know something only if
we have sets of rationally evaluable commitments and if we also have
the rational competencies that are required to grasp how propositions
stand as evidence for, or in favour of the truth of, other propositions.
Knowledge is never acquired or possessed in an isolated, atomistic,
way. Second, we risk downplaying the fact that the significance that
knowledge has for an agent (e.g., the difference it makes to how
she acts) depends upon that agent s cognitive and practical
commitments.
The underlying point that we want to stress here is that informa-
tion acquires ethical and normative significance not because it is about
certain special aspects of the world, but because it can or may be used in
108 Rethinking Informed Consent in Bioethics
certain inferences and actions. These inferences and actions always
depend on background knowledge, and on competencies, commit-
ments and interests other than the mere possession of specific infor-
mation. What is informative and significant for one person is often
meaningless or irrelevant to another.
This point is easily missed because discussions of privacy, and of
other normative issues bearing on information, often focus on cases
that presuppose a rich and distinctive, but quite untypical, set of
background knowledge, interests and inferential abilities. We may
find ourselves concentrating on cases where insurers want access to
medical information in order to increase premiums for those with
higher health risks, or where direct marketers want information
about purchasing habits so that they can target their products.
Once we see possession of  personal information against these
sorts of backgrounds or contexts, we may be led to think that the
information itself has intrinsic ethical significance. We may ascribe
specific motives, interests and knowledge to others, and then see
their acquisition of a limited amount of  personal information as the
decisive element in making certain sorts of action feasible or desir-
able for them. Yet we do not really think of the information as such as
requiring protection or special handling, or as being subject to
informational obligations. Rather we think of certain uses of infor-
mation as raising special issues, and as subject to informational
obligations. This suggests that informational obligations bear on
epistemic and communicative actions and transactions, rather than
on information content and information transfer. Informational
privacy is better framed by an agency-based model of communi-
cating and informing than by the content-based approach of the
conduit/container model.
A focus on content obscures ways in which personal information
may be used for impersonal ends
While the literature on informational privacy concentrates exces-
sively on examples where one party has a prior interest in knowing or
making known certain facts about an individual, and in using that
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