Beyond privacy: longitudinal ZMET analysis of thoughts and feelings

Purpose Consumers increasingly reveal more than they intend online yet clamor for privacy protection, saddling businesses with costly strategic and legal challenges. This study aims to reveal what drives consumers’ thoughts and feelings about privacy, and what has changed over a decade. Design/methodology/approach This study used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) to conduct qualitative interviews in 2008 and 2019 and identified the deep metaphors revealing consumers’ thoughts and feelings about their privacy concerns (PCs). Findings Metaphor analysis revealed organizational justice theory (OJT) as the overarching theoretical framework. A two-timepoint comparison showed that consumers who once wanted balance in their relationship with firms now want control over their own resource (information) in response to the unmet need for fairness reflected in increasing PCs. The three OJT dimensions – distributive, procedural and interactional justice emerge as a framework for the data and helps develop privacy-related subdimensions. Research limitations/implications This study extends OJT beyond employee–organization settings to consumer-firm relationships and develops privacy-specific OJT dimensions and subdimensions as a theoretical baseline for future comparative and empirical testing. Practical implications Managers should widen their narrow focus on PCs to encompass consumers’ entire information-related experiences, ensuring equitable value exchange, just procedures and respectful interactions to mitigate resistance to information acquisition/use. Social implications By reframing privacy as fairness, the study highlights pathways to restore consumer confidence, reduce anxiety and inform policy debates around equitable data practices. Originality/value A longitudinal ZMET provides rare insight into evolving thoughts and feelings about privacy, offering a novel, justice-based framework for understanding and addressing PCs.