'Doing privacy': exploring the strategies consumers use to achieve privacy

Drawing on image-elicited depth interviews, this study endeavours to uncover the strategies consumers use to achieve privacy as they navigate through contemporary consumer society. The interpretive analysis reveals that privacy (i.e., sovereignty over one's personal domain), is actively managed through the use of one or more cognitive and behavioural strategies. As the study's informants articulated their privacy concerns using metaphors pertaining to warfare, the strategies they use to achieve privacy have been categorized as such. These 'war' strategies have been labelled as withdraw, defend, attack and reconcile. By uncovering the strategies consumers use to 'do' privacy, this study questions the 'privacy paradox' and dispels its assumption that consumers are passive, ignorant and malleable players in the marketplace that submissively tolerate and readily accept privacy invasions.