There are several different types of privacy. Decisional privacy concerns issues surrounding the use and availability of a person's personal information, and spatial privacy deals with the physical space where a person lives. Typically, concerns regarding informational privacy relate to the authority of an individual to make decisions. In addition, concerns about physical spaces are often related to individual autonomy. Listed below are some of the common types of privacy. These categories are important to understand, and you should exercise them to protect yourself and your family.

Informational privacy: This is the most prevalent type of privacy today, and involves rules and regulations around the use and application of personal information. Generally, aesthetic privacy violations have minimal impact on an individual's life chances. By contrast, decisional and proprietary privacy breaches involve the use or application of private information. Information discovery is the heart of surveillance. Individuals who nullify surveillance do not have to worry about how their information is used. However, this type of privacy can affect their livelihoods, and it is essential to discuss the implications of any surveillance before using it.

Although it is impossible to maintain complete privacy, we still need some types of privacy. In many cases, we need to share information with people who have a legitimate need to know it in order to provide a benefit or service. Some of the reasons people withhold personal information include protecting their reputation, social status, or self-esteem. Other reasons for withholding personal information include competitive advantage or social status. And, as we've seen, the types of privacy are not limited to individuals but also extend to organizations and businesses.

While there are various types of privacy, they are all related to the social and economic contexts in which they occur. For example, surveillance is often seen as the opposite of privacy. It may be the dark side of the social dimension of privacy. It is also important to remember that privacy is a social value. For most of us, privacy is the right to keep our lives private. In the case of the Internet, however, it is often the right of the people to use private information, but it is not always the right thing to do.

Although most existing privacy theories consider the privacy expectation as a single, level construct and employ a single standard for evaluation, they do not include the other types of privacy. Among the types of privacy expectations is the desired type, or the level of privacy that people ideally would like. In other words, the desired type is what we ideally want to be able to maintain internal privacy at any given moment. The latter category is similar to the desired type.