ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the public-private distinction in society and its dominant framing and develops a typology of privacy theories that has as its base a notion of the public-private distinction in society. The typology is capable of clarifying the variety of theoretical approaches to privacy. Results from the interviews can also be connected to the theoretical discussion about the status and the meaning of privacy. Interviewees who mention limits to privacy cannot hold a reductionistic notion of privacy; their position may be projectionistic or dualistic. It is not sufficient to construct advanced, non-biased theories of privacy; we also need to explain why people hold individualistically biased privacy notions to large extents. The chapter reviews concrete instances of privacy critiques that refer to the privacy critiques of projectionistic approaches, social theories of the public sphere, feminist approaches, economic theories, surveillance studies, intercultural approaches, and postmodernist theories. Existing economic critiques of privacy all come from a classical paradigm in economic theory.
