Due to the advent of the era of artificial intelligence, it not only has impact on the traditional legal system of personality rights, but also provides the new soil for the generation of new personality right. A large number of informational personality rights based on “legal interests of personal information” emerged as the times require, it is difficult to follow the traditional theory of personality rights to interpret it, so it is appropriate to rename this kind of personality rights as “informational personality rights”. The existing literature mostly focuses on the sporadic exploration of specific personality rights such as “personal information right”, but has not paid attention to the generality of emerging personality rights in the practice of digital intelligence, and the concept of “informational personality right” with epochal characteristics has not been found. Therefore, on the basis of clarifying the normative meaning of “informational personality right”, this paper further demonstrates the reasons or values on which it can become concrete personality right, we hope to promote its identity transformation from emerging right to legal right.
We sorted out relevant literature of information law and personality rights in CNKI, Pkulaw, Westlaw, Heinonline and other databases, and comprehensively applied interdisciplinary approach, system and logical analysis, finally found that informational personality rights is an emerging personality right based on the digital technology advancement, and it is the legal response to human dignity when faced with the revolution of the intelligent technology, and it mainly includes sub-types of the informational privacy right, personal information right, and the right to be forgotten. Form the legal point of view, the peculiarity of the informational personality right is different form the other special personality right, which takes various facets of personal information an the object of rights, satisfy the subjective standard of the will power attribute of private right autonomy, and serve as the substantive standard and empirical of the objective legal order. It has the legal foundation and normative basis for legalization, and conforms to the theoretical and practical benchmarks for the realization of rights. Therefore, the informational personality rights should be incorporated into the family system of personality rights, so that it can give full play to its important institutional value of enriching the personality rights' theory, expanding the power and capacity of personality rights, enriching the rule system of personality rights and coping with the crisis of dignity.
This paper contributes to the existing literature in two aspects: the first is to put forward the basic concept of “informational personality right”, and conduct a systematic study on the emerging personality right carried by broad personal information, expanding the previous literature on the theory of emerging personality right from a new perspective. Second, this paper is different from the existing research paradigm of scattered research on specific personality rights such as “privacy right and personal information right”, it is committed to exploring the common issues of the generation of informational personality rights in the digital age, explaining its basic category in combination with its normative characteristics, analyzing its object structure, and establishing its identification criteria, which is to obtain a fundamental understanding of the commonality of informational personality rights.
This research is helpful to standardize the legal structure of the emerging personality right and expand the theoretical accumulation of personality right in Chinese civil law. The establishment of standards for the generation of informational personality rights can provide intellectual reference for the formation and construction of relevant emerging personality rights, and then enrich and expand the theoretical system of personality rights. At the same time, it has important reference value for implementing and improving the personality rights compilation system of China's Civil Code, and provides academic basis for the judicial protection of emerging personality rights in the intelligent era, and then promote the full play of the utility of civil law in the governance of digital society.