Toward a More Human-Centered View of Privacy Needs: An Industry Perspective

To do our jobs as designers and marketers entering the privacy space, we seek a more human-centered understanding of the needs that privacy serves. The scholarly study of privacy has historically held information at the center, focusing on how data are collected, processed, or retained. While this framing has been valuable for legal and technical discussions, a need is growing to understand privacy through a human-centric lens, especially as robust privacy practices prove to be a market differentiator for products and brands. Industry practitioners typically rely on academic psychology to identify unmet needs and align with human nature, but we found it necessary to fill this gap in the privacy literature. Drawing on our research on social conversations, international surveys, qualitative interviews, and cultural studies, we observed five basic privacy needs that we review here. Hoping to spark further research and support organizations who are doing business differently by taking a more human-centered view of privacy, we argue that laypeople experience privacy as an enabler of their needs to control what they own, what spaces they inhabit, what choices they make with their lives, what relationships they have, and what identities define them.