Digifesto

There was a nice small gathering of nearby researchers (and one important call-in) working on Contextual Integrity at Princeton’s CITP today. It was a nice opportunity to share what we’ve been working on and make plans for the future.

There was a really nice range of different contributions: systems engineering for privacy policy enforcement, empirical survey work testing contextualized privacy expectations, a proposal for a participatory design approach to identifying privacy norms in marginalized communities, a qualitative study on how children understand privacy, and an analysis of the privacy implications of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, among other work.

What was great is that everybody was on the same page about what we were after: getting a better understanding of what privacy really is, so that we can design between policies, educational tools, and technologies that preserve it. For one reason or another, the people in the room had been attracted to Contextual Integrity. Many of us have reservations about the theory in one way or another, but we all see its value and potential.

One note of consensus was that we should try to organize a workshop dedicated specifically to Contextual Integrity, and widening what we accomplished today to bring in more researchers. Today’s meeting was a convenience sample, leaving out a lot of important perspectives.

Another interesting thing that happened today was a general acknowledgment that Contextual Integrity is not a static framework. As a theory, it is subject to change as scholars critique and contribute to it through their empirical and theoretical work. A few of us are excited about the possibility of a Contextual Integrity 2.0, extending the original theory to fill theoretical gaps that have been identified in it.

I’d articulate the aspiration of the meeting today as being about letting Contextual Integrity grow from being a framework into a field–a community of people working together to cultivate something, in this case, a kind of knowledge.