Well, it depends on who you ask. Broadly speaking, Privacy is the right to be let alone or freedom from interference or intrusion. Information privacy is the right to have some control over how your personal information is collected and used.
Ask most people these days what they think of when it comes to Privacy, and you're likely to have a conversation about massive data breaches, wearable tech, social networking, and targeted advertising miscues—not to mention the Snowden revelations.
Additionally, various cultures have widely differing views on a person's rights regarding Privacy and how it should be regulated.
If we want to be more specific, Privacy is about protecting all personal information. The scope of personal information is generally broad. Here is a list of what is usually considered personal information by Privacy regulations all over the world:
- Your names
- Your address, phone number, email address
- Birth information, family members' information
- Race, religion, weight, height
- Employment information
- Education information
- Your bank, payment, and financial information
- Your browsing history on the web, your passwords, and logins
- Your social media activity
- Your health information
- Your government identification documents and numbers (social security number, passport number, driver's license number)
- Your purchase history, orders IDs
- Information identifying personally owned property
- Where do you go (location data)
- Physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural, or social identity
- Online identifier (like IP addresses, cookies, and radio frequency identification tags like web beacons)
- Personal characteristics, including photographic images, videos, fingerprints, handwriting, or other unique biometric data
- CCTV footage/images of you, drone videos/pictures of you
To sum up, using the definition of the European GDPR Privacy regulation, personal information means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person.