Understanding Nuances of Privacy and Security in the Context of Information Systems

The concepts of privacy and security are interrelated but the underlying meanings behind them may vary across different contexts. As information technology is becoming integrated in our lives, emerging information privacy and security issues have been catching both scholars’ and practitioners’ attention with the aim to address these issues. Examples of such issues include users’ role in information security breaches, online information disclosure and its impact on information privacy, and the collection and use of electronic data for surveillance. These issues are associated with and can be explained by various disciplines, such as psychology, law, business, economics, and information systems. This diversity of disciplines leads to an inclusive approach that subsumes interrelated constructs, such as security, anonymity, and surveillance, as a part of privacy in the current literature. However, privacy and security are distinct concepts. In this paper, we argue that to better understand the role of human factors in the context of information privacy and security, these two concepts need to be examined independently. We examine the two concepts and systematically present various nuances of information privacy and security.