Psychologically, privacy is a self-related subjective experience which may include one or many persons. It is also recognized and defined, formally and informally, in the culture. Both individually and collectively, privacy is structured in relation to variations in the things which acquire privacy meanings, the persons who arouse privacy responses and the situational contexts within which behavior has privacy connotations. Empirical exploration of public and personal definitions of privacy is needed. Such research would help clarify the potential value of this concept for analysis of many problems in social psychology and sociology, a few of them being presented here.