Helen Nissenbaum

Title: Privacy, technology, policy, and the integrity of social life

My talk presents an overview of contextual integrity, an account of privacy that calls for the appropriate flow of personal information. This account contrasts with conceptions of privacy that present it as a right to shut off access to information (secrecy), or a right to control personal information. These conceptions, which frequently inform law, regulation, and technology design, are problematic because they constantly require privacy to be traded off against some other social good, such as security, efficiency, or free speech. But they also miss the complexity most people recognize and accept in the ways they share information and allow information to be shared with other individuals and institutions. Contextual integrity accommodates this complexity, modeling it with informational norms, which govern the flow of information. These norms vary as a function of the social context, the capacities in which senders and recipients act, the types of information in question, and the principles under which information flows from party to party. Personal information plays a crucial role in well-functioning societies, but its flow must be appropriately constrained not only for the benefit of individuals but for the integrity of social life itself.