Rather than taking a pessimistic stand that treats all consumer surveillance as malicious coercive attempts from online marketers and all are detrimental to personal privacy, this paper proactively looks for the possibility of consensual online consumer surveillance practices, i.e., privacy-friendly online marketing practices. Specifically, the paper will first discuss the concept of privacy. Instead of treating privacy merely as a legal right, it is considered as a social construct. Privacy does not mean a state of solitude. It is more a relational concept, i.e., it is meaningful only in relation to others in some sort of social conduct.
Privacy refers to the capability of negotiating boundary conditions with others in social relations.
This conception of privacy includes control of both outflows and inflows of information in different social contexts. In other words, privacy is the ability of a person to decide what personal information is to be disclosed to others in different social encounters, including how others may use the disclosed information, and who may initiate contact with the person, in either proximate or virtual spaces. Secondly, the paper then will turn to explicate the concept of surveillance. Surveillance means systematic observation. Consumer surveillance refers to systematic observation of consumers' consumption behaviors and use patterns based on, as well as generated from, information yielded from interactions and transactions.