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79 Wash. L. Rev. 119 (2004)
Privacy as Contextual Integrity

handle is hein.journals/washlr79 and id is 129 raw text is: Copyright C 2004 by Washington Law Review Association PRIVACY AS CONTEXTUAL INTEGRITY Helen Nissenbaum* Abstract: The practices of public surveillance, which include the monitoring of individuals in public through a variety of media (e.g., video, data, online), are among the least understood and controversial challenges to privacy in an age of information technologies. The fragmentary nature of privacy policy in the United States reflects not only the oppositional pulls of diverse vested interests, but also the ambivalence of unsettled intuitions on mundane phenomena such as shopper cards, closed-circuit television, and biometrics. This Article, which extends earlier work on the problem of privacy in public, explains why some of the prominent theoretical approaches to privacy, which were developed over time to meet traditional privacy challenges, yield unsatisfactory conclusions in the case of public surveillance. It posits a new construct, contextual integrity, as an alternative benchmark for privacy, to capture the nature of challenges posed by information technologies. Contextual integrity ties adequate protection for privacy to norms of specific contexts, demanding that information gathering and dissemination be appropriate to that context and obey the governing norms of distribution within it. Building on the idea of spheres of justice, developed by political philosopher Michael Walzer, this Article argues that public surveillance violates a right to privacy because it violates contextual integrity; as such, it constitutes injustice and even tyranny. I. INTRODUCTION Privacy is one of the most enduring social issues associated with information technologies. It has been a fixture in public discourse through radical transformations of technology from stand-alone computers, housing massive databases of government and other large institutions, to the current distributed network of computers with linked information systems, such as the World Wide Web, networked mobile devices, video and radio-frequency surveillance systems, and computer- enabled biometric identification. Among many privacy controversies that have stirred public concern, a particular set of cases, to which I have applied the label public surveillance, remains vexing not only because these cases drive opponents into seemingly irreconcilable stances, but because traditional theoretical insights fail to clarify the sources of their controversial nature.' This Article seeks to shed light on the problem of . Associate Professor, Department of Culture & Communication, New York University, East Building 7th Floor, 239 Greene Street, New York, New York 10003. E-mail address: helen.nissenbaum@nyu.edu. Many people and institutions have inspired and helped me in this endeavor, beginning with the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Sciences, where I wrote and presented early drafts.

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