In Unicode, Private Use is a concept to allow characters to be defined and used by private agreement between parties (that is, not involving the Unicode Consortium), using unspecified code points in a Private Use Area or range. The private agreement may be published, and often is. Such publication may include a font that supports the definition (showing the glyphs), and processes to support privately-defined graphic or even control effects (e.g. a clickable <do print> character). As a stability rule, the Unicode Standard guarantees these Private Use code points will never be assigned regular characters, so Unicode will never interfere with the private agreement.

For example, Apple Inc. has published the Apple logo to be encoded at Private-use code point U+F8FF <private-use-F8FF>, and maintains this in its fonts and systems.

By definition, multiple private parties may define a specific code point this way, with the consequence that a user can experience using the wrong font, seeing characters from another definition set.