Helen Nissenbaum

Helen Nissenbaum is a philosopher of information technology who has taught at Princeton, New York University and Cornell Tech in New York. She developed the theory of privacy as contextual integrity, according to which information flows carry norms tied to the social context in which they occur, and privacy is violated when a flow breaches those norms. The framework explains why the public-versus-private distinction fails to capture many privacy harms in digital life and has influenced law, policy and engineering.

Key ideas

• Privacy is the appropriate flow of information, judged by norms of the context in which it is shared.
• Information that is in some sense public can still be misused in ways that violate privacy.
• Contexts such as medicine, education or friendship each carry their own norms about who may receive what information and on what terms.
• Deliberately adding noise to data, obfuscation, can be a legitimate means of privacy protection.

Major works

• "Privacy as Contextual Integrity" (2004)
• Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (2010)
• Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest (2015, with Finn Brunton)

In the conversation

• Discussion Contextual integrity explains why my aunt’s clinic group chat felt wrong Nur Aisyah Rahman · 5 replies