Privacy is a common yet personalized notion.
While seemingly contrary, it speaks to the value of privacy in both individual and group settings. For the individual, privacy is a universal process. For the group, privacy is culturally specific and used to regulate social interaction (Altman, 1977). Consider, as Altman does, an office environment. In Western society, a closed office door signifies a desire for privacy while an open door signifies a desire for inclusion.
Suppose your company decided to switch to an open workspace, eliminating offices entirely. Perhaps to signify a desire for privacy, people would begin to utilize headphones or other devices accepted as a signal to others not to interrupt. Similar signals exist in other societies or groups and are used thusly to regulate social interaction (Altman, 1977). No doubt the cultural specificity to the need for balance contributes to the many definitions of privacy (for example, (Abu-Gazzeh, 1995; Sharma, 2005)).
Privacy can be considered as a marriage of categories: physical, territorial or informational. These overlap conceptually and in practice, as in …
Physical privacy is generally intended to reference the ability of a person to manage their own physical body, to choose sexual partners and / or to make medical decisions about our own treatment.
Territorial privacy refers to the right of privacy over our homes, often referenced in the legal right to protection against unlawful Government search and seizure (a right which also covers personal (bodily) and informational privacy).
Informational privacy is an ancient notion, beginning with secret ballots in voting systems and extending to more recent concepts of privacy on the Internet. This aspect may also include the idea of a right to financial data, or an interest in how records about ourselves are created and managed by computers in different organizations.
Privacy as most people know it today is really a subset of informational privacy, specifically the legislated action of personal information protection resulting from disclosure of identifiable personal information.