Adding the missing user to policy discourse: understanding US user telephone privacy concerns

In telecommunication privacy policy discourses, there is a paucity of evidence regarding how lay people understand and deal with telephone privacy issues. This article aims to add the voice of the missing user to policy discourse and reports the results of a US study of residential users in the state of Ohio. We provide a descriptive analysis of users' understandings of telephone privacy concerns; their strategies for protecting phone privacy; and their assessments of these strategies. Further, we posit that the goal of adding the missing user voice cannot be realised by conducting empirical research that is guided solely by traditional categories of users (e.g. users defined demographically). Drawing on Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology, we generated two sets of alternative categories of users through salience measures tapping orientations toward the telephone; and function measures tapping specific uses of the phone in life situations. We pitted these alternative categories against demographic categories in tests of their power to predict user perspectives and behaviours relating to phone privacy. Results of the descriptive analysis showed that experiences of privacy violations by phone were widespread and that residential users construct phone privacy violations in terms of immediate and visible impediments and constraints on their lives. The results of the predictive analysis showed that each of the predictor categories played a role in predicting user perspectives and behaviours. Demographic measures, for example, accounted for more variance in predicting whether users took action to protect phone privacy while function measures did so in predicting whether users saw these protective actions as hindering. We conclude that there is a gulf between privacy concerns as expressed by telecommunication policy experts and as expressed by residential phone users. Attempting to understand users based only on demographic characteristics alone provides a far too limited portrait of users and the experiential conditions of their phone use.