Privacy is one of the most urgent issues associated with the advancement of information technology. Yet, there is a growing concern that the issues surrounding privacy have been too complex to understand, with conflicting evidence on how well prevalent theories explain people’s privacy-related actions. In a paper forthcoming at Information Systems Research, we illustrate how an onto-epistemological perspective drawing from Dreyfus’ influential exegesis of the Heideggerian framework could bring about new research questions that complement the existing ones in making our theories more reflective of the richness of privacy phenomena in practice.

The paper, “An Onto-Epistemological Analysis of Information Privacy Research”, was co-authored by Heng Xu and Nan Zhang.