Winner of the 2021 Covey Award of IACAP

Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)

Contextual Integrity: Theory and a Few Applications

About the lecture [stream]
The theory of contextual integrity defines privacy as appropriate flow of personal information, flow that respects social norms (rules) for data. Ubiquitous, data-intensive practices — online and off – have drawn attention to the dire need for a robust conception of privacy that, simultaneously, is meaningful, gets at why we care about it, and underscores the need to protect it with technology and regulation. I will explain why contextual integrity meets all three benchmarks. Pursuing CI, however, means bending away from one-dimensional ideas that have gripped the privacy world for decades, namely, control over information about ourselves, simple stoppage of flow, and fetishization of specific, “sensitive” attributes (e.g. identity, health.) By contrast, CI proposes data flow rules for all data (nothing is up for grabs). It also places the integrity of social life on equal footing with the interests of data subjects as reasons why it is essential to value privacy in a free society. This talk will briefly review basic ideas behind CI and examples of past and ongoing applications.

About the speaker
Helen Nissenbaum is a professor of Information Science and founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, New York City. Her work examines societal, ethical, and political dimensions of digital technologies, issues such as privacy, bias in digital systems, trust online, values in design, and accountability in computational systems. Prof. Nissenbaum’s publications, including books, Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010), have been translated into seven languages. She has contributed to privacy-enhancing software, TrackMeNot (protecting against profiling based on Web search) and AdNauseam (protecting against profiling based on ad clicks). Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Helen Nissenbaum@HNissenbaum
Professor, Cornell Tech
Director, Digital Life Initiative

photo credit: Helen Nissenbaum

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Wednesday, 7. July 2021, 18:15-19:45 (CEST)

Zoom Webinar
Details to access the keynotes will be made public on a timely basis at http://uhh.de/inf-cepe-iacap2021