The ethical issues involved with marketing research are receiving increased public scrutiny, prompting calls for marketing scholars and research practitioners to revisit the issue. To support researchers and practitioners, this paper provides a systematic scoping review of research on the ethics of market research developed across a range of literatures (N = 134). It demonstrates that, over 70 years, marketing scholars have explored the ethics of market research from normative, descriptive, theoretical and technical approaches. But, while marketing scholars were once at the forefront of theorising the ethics of marketing research, the field is increasingly fragmented and specialized. The result is that, following a series of theoretical innovations in the 1980s, progress has all but ended. We ask why marketing scholars have turned away from the ethics of marketing research given the importance of the topic in practice.

The introduction of AI-based technologies has dramatically altered the premises for consumer privacy, enabling the unprecedented manipulation of consumers’ decision-making online. Given these recent threats to consumer privacy and autonomy, and considering autonomy as the ultimate outcome of privacy, I propose that a reconceptualization is warranted to reflect contemporary consumer privacy challenges and to realign the concept with its theoretical foundations. To this end, I introduce the dimension of decisional privacy, focused on autonomy versus interference in consumer decision-making. Building on previous privacy literature and extending previous theorizing about information privacy and decisional privacy as complementary, I posit that these two dimensions of privacy together comprise consumer privacy. Addressing protection from interference as an under-communicated function of consumer privacy, the paper aims to clarify, exemplify, and engage in the conceptual development of decisional privacy in the context of consumer decision-making online. In addition to its significance for consumer wellbeing and democracy collectively, the extension of consumer privacy to explicitly encompass interference has theoretical implications for privacy concern, the proxy used to measure privacy, yielding important insights for marketing scholars and practitioners.