Contemporary privacy theories and European discussions about data protection employ the notion of ‘personal information’ to designate their areas of concern. The notion of personal information is demarcated from non-personal information—or just information—indicating that we are dealing with a specific kind of information. However, within privacy scholarship the notion of personal information appears undertheorized, rendering the concept somewhat unclear. We argue that in an age of datafication, protection of personal information and privacy is crucial, making the understanding of what is meant by ‘personal information’ more important than ever. To contribute to this aim, we analyse the conception of personal information and its nature, including the distinction between personal and non-personal information from a philosophy of language perspective. Through analyses of aboutness and relative aboutness we point to challenges related to the demarcation between personal and non-personal information, which may in practice lead to all information being personal.

当代隐私理论和欧洲关于数据保护的讨论采用“个人信息”的概念来指定他们关注的领域。个人信息的概念与非个人信息（或只是信息）区分开来，表明我们正在处理特定类型的信息。然而，在隐私学术界，个人信息的概念似乎没有充分理论化，使得这个概念有些不清楚。我们认为，在数据化时代，保护个人信息和隐私至关重要，这使得理解“个人信息”的含义比以往任何时候都更加重要。为了实现这一目标，我们分析了个人信息的概念及其性质，包括从语言哲学的角度区分个人信息和非个人信息。通过对 aboutness 和 relative aboutness 的分析，我们指出了与个人信息和非个人信息之间的界限相关的挑战，这在实践中可能会导致所有信息都是个人信息。