Digital technologies and privacy: State of the art and research directions

Digital technologies have transformed every aspect of marketing and have brought consumer privacy front and center of research and discourse over the last two decades. Whereas companies and consumers have arguably benefited through the availability and use of data made possible by digitalization, consumer privacy-related concerns raise compelling questions that researchers, companies, and policymakers are addressing. In this Review Paper, we review privacy related to digital technologies in marketing, highlighting the constantly evolving nature of the field. We provide an overview of the rich contributions made by the articles in the special issue on digital technologies and privacy, and the original insights they provide for researchers and practitioners in four domains – communication, retailing, pricing, and product personalization. We identify and outline future research directions in each of these four domains to expand our understanding of privacy at the intersection of psychology and marketing by motivating new scholarly research and providing actionable insights to managers and policymakers.