Typical offices lack the acoustics needed to keep speech private.

Evidence

To study questions of privacy, a “quiet” office (N5 = 4.7 sone) and a “louder” office (N5 = 9.6 sone) were chosen. With a rhyme-test after Sotscheck, 50% speech intelligibility is obtained at a speech level of 38 dB for the “quiet” office, and 47 dB for the “louder” office. A speech level of only 38 dB is rather unrealistic in an office, and even 47 dB speech level will be exceeded in many practical cases. Therefore, in the “quiet” office, privacy is impossible, and even in the “louder” office, the desired privacy will be violated in many cases. — Professor Dr.-Ing. Hugo Fastl, Professor Dr.-Ing. Eberhard, Psychoacoustics- Facts and Models, 1823

Categorization

• QUESTION: The threshold for 50% intelligibility being called ‘privacy’ is odd - real privacy usually needs far lower intelligibility. What intelligibility level do privacy standards actually require?