1. Someone who buys goods or services: Consumers want better and safer products.
2. Someone or something that ingests something, by eating it, drinking it, or using it up.
3. In an ecological community or food chain, an organism that feeds on other organisms, or on materials derived from them.

Consumers include herbivorous and carnivorous animals, which feed on plants and other animals respectively; and also organisms including worms, fungi, and bacteria, that feed on nonliving organic material.

1. Laws and regulations that seek to protect an individual from loss of privacy due to failures or limitations of corporate customer privacy measures.
2. Consumer privacy, also known as customer privacy, involves the handling and protection of sensitive personal information that individuals provide in the course of everyday business transactions.

This involves the exchange or use of data electronically or by any other means, including telephone, fax, written correspondence, and even direct word of mouth.

Gradually, customer privacy measures alone have proven to be insufficient to deal with the many hazards of corporate data sharing, corporate mergers, employee turnover, theft of hard drives, or other data-carrying hardware from job locations.

With the advent and evolution of the internet and other electronic methods of mass communications, consumer privacy has become a major issue.

Personal information, when misused or inadequately protected, can result in identity theft, financial fraud, and other problems that collectively cost people around the world, businesses, and governments great financial losses each year.