Contextual Integrity and its Discontents: A Critique of Helen Nissenbaum's Normative Arguments

Helen Nissenbaum's doctrine of contextual integrity has won extraordinary attention as a standard for acceptability in the flow of personal information. It promises to distinguish between forms of disclosure that are ethically justified and others, based on the social relationships and purposes of the settings in which they occur. The attraction of any analytical system that could accomplish such results is obvious, but this article holds that Nissenbaum's claims are not fulfilled. Notions that norms underlying any given domain of human conduct are unambiguous or uncontested simply do not withstand close examination. Indeed, most social norms, particularly in rapidly changing domains of human conduct like privacy practices, are volatile and highly contested. Many different interpretations of the “correct” norms are possible for any given context, and thinkers are always inclined to embrace those interpretations that most closely fit their pre‐existing mind‐sets and value positions. This flexibility has helped make the doctrine enormously attractive to policymakers seeking to defuse conflicts between proponents of new uses of personal information and privacy advocates. But it has hardly yielded unambiguous policy prescriptions that all parties could agree on.