Before launching into an examination of privacy across cultures, it is important to recognize several problems with such an analysis. First, it is not easy to use ethnographic materials to verify or confirm the framework of this article. Many cultural descriptions are not sufficiently explicit and were not developed with our particular model of privacy in mind. Thus, there may be instances in which a culture is described as having “no privacy,” examples are provided, and the situation is left at that. If we use such material are we to conclude that our hypothesis is invalid, and/or that it is not adequately testable because the ethnography may have been incomplete in its description of the total range of privacy regulation mechanisms?