On the Protected Legal Interest of the Crime of Infringing upon Citizens' Personal Information: With the Right to Informational Self-Determination at Its Core

The crime of infringing upon citizens' personal information in China's Criminal Law has played a significant regulatory role in safeguarding individual rights in the information age. However, long-standing theoretical disagreements over its protected legal interest have directly undermined the precision of legal application and the depth of scholarly inquiry. Through a systematic doctrinal analysis of the nature of the legal interest, this article argues that the core protected legal interest should be citizens' right to informational self-determination. Personal information possesses an independent legal nature, characterized primarily by identifiability, which distinguishes it from the mere concept of data. Among the competing theoretical positions, the supra-individual legal interest theory encounters difficulties in systematic positioning and ambiguity of the legal interest itself, while the individual legal interest approach aligns more closely with the crime's normative placement. Within individual legal interest doctrines, the theories of personal dignity and personal freedom prove excessively abstract; the privacy right theory fails to meet the demands of protection in the digital age; and the personal information right theory, though reasonable, still requires further refinement to distill its essential core. As the substantive kernel of the right to personal information, the right to informational self-determination is grounded in both comparative law origins-particularly the landmark ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court in the 1983 Census Case-and domestic legal norms. It furnishes a clear theoretical benchmark for interpreting the crime's constituent elements and delimiting the scope of criminalization, thereby enabling precise protection of citizens' personal information rights and interests.