Privacy and intimacy: Blurred boundaries in the online age

Résumé 0

Digitalization, and especially Web 2.0, have considerably broadened the potential for interactions between individuals, including interpersonal exchanges and in the context of interactions between brands and their audiences. With these increased possibilities, privacy protection concerns have become a key issue in marketing research, among managers, and in the eyes of the law. While these three worlds have each developed frameworks to define and protect privacy, there remain considerable differences between them, complicating the chances of reaching the kind of consensual vision that individuals need. Thus, legal definitions of privacy do not seem to account for Web 2.0’s specific characteristics. Moreover, they do not always correspond with those used by professionals, who define protecting customers’ privacy as gaining their consent. These visions both differ from that described by users, who associate and confuse privacy with the concept of intimacy, which is, perhaps surprisingly, barely broached in legal texts. Using a methodology that differs from those usually used in privacy research, we propose a new approach, based on the theory of social representations, whereby we survey individuals about their definitions of privacy, intimacy, and the digital versions of these two concepts in order to determine similarities, distinctions, and links between the visions of researchers, managers, jurists, and, finally, users.