Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
Comment by: Anita Allen
PLSC 2010
Workshop draft abstract:
Newly emerging socio-technical systems and practices, undergirded by digital media and information science and technology, have enabled massive transformations in the capacity to monitor behavior, amass and analyze personal information, and distribute, publish, communicate and disseminate it. These have spawned great social anxiety and, in turn, laws, policies, public interest advocacy, and technologies, framed as efforts to protect a right to privacy. A settled definition of this right, however, remains elusive. The book argues that common definitions as control over personal information or secrecy, that is, minimization of access to personal information, do not capture what people care about when they complain and protest that their right to privacy is under threat. Suggesting that this right may be circumscribed as applying only to special categories of “sensitive” information or PII does not avoid its pitfalls.
What matters to people is not the sharing of information — this is often highly valued — but the inappropriate sharing. Characterizing appropriate sharing is the heart of the book’s mission, turning to wisdom embodied in entrenched norms governing flows of personal information in society. The theory of contextual integrity offers “context-relevant informational norms” as a model for these social norms of information flow. It claims that in assessing whether a particular act or system or practice violates privacy, people are sensitive to the context in which these occur — e.g. healthcare, politics, religious practice, education, commerce — what types of information are in question, about whom it is, from whom it flows and to what recipients. What also matters are the terms of flow, called “transmission principles” that govern these flows, for example, with the consent of an information subject, whether in one direction or reciprocally, whether forced, given, bought and sold, and so on. Radical transformations in information are protested because they violate entrenched informational norms, that is, when they violate contextual integrity.
But not all technologies that induce novel flows are resisted, and contextual integrity would be unhelpfully conservative if it sweepingly deemed them morally wrong. The theory, therefore, also discriminates between those that are acceptable, even laudable, from those that are problematic. Inspired by the great work of other privacy theorists — past and contemporary — the theory suggests we examine how well novel flows serve diverse interests as well as important moral and political values compared with entrenched flows. The crux, however, lies in establishing how well these serve internal values, ends, and purpose of the relevant background contexts, ultimately, that is, how well they serve the integrity of society’s key structures and institutions.