JOURNAL OF INFORMATION POLICY 1 (2011): 149-151.

BOOK REVIEW

HELEN NISSENBAUM

P RIVACY IN C ONTEXT : T ECHNOLOGY, P OLICY, AND THE

I NTEGRITY OF SOCIAL L IFE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2010

Technology has been a driving force for advancing our understanding of

complex communications systems. In Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy,
and the Integrity of Social Life, Helen Nissenbaum of New York University
investigates privacy issues based on the notion that technology should be
perceived as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon connected to a
broader social system. Consequently, information technology in particular
is inherently socio-technical and is guided by the social and cultural
norms of society. Information technology, especially digital, has raised
growing concerns over privacy in that the technology bears a potentially
disruptive power that threatens the social and political lives of individuals.
Nissenbaum finds threats to privacy from contemporary technologybased systems and practices that have the capacity to track people, and to
analyze and disseminate their private information, thus putting ones
privacy in danger. While exploring the most prominent theories and
principles of privacy as a social issue, Nissenbaum casts doubt on the
validity of the private/public dichotomy in confronting and resolving privacy concerns. Throughout the
book, the author makes a critical effort to reconstruct a framework for capturing the social context in which
every privacy-related issue is raised and challenged.
Privacy is a tricky concept to define, but its importance is not in doubt. Nissenbaum does not confine the
concept of privacy within individuals rights to control their own information, but expands it into ensuring
the appropriate flows of that personal information. In this book, personal information is conceptualized as
information that is related to an identified or identifiable natural person, and the concept of information flow
is used deliberately to avoid confusion in defining the concept of privacy via different disciplines. To identify
and ensure the appropriateness of information flow, the author proposes a framework of contextual
integrity in evaluating privacy concerns within technology-based systems and practices. Throughout the
book, the author articulates that the framework of contextual integrity is a fundamental part of efforts to
describe, prescribe, and adjudicate current privacy disputes in the digital age.
Part I is dedicated to delineating the contemporary landscape of information technologies and socio-technical
systems that raise public concerns about threats to privacy. Nissenbaum organizes Part I into three chapters
monitoring, analysis, and dissemination which are functional characteristics of information technologies

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that threaten privacy. Each of the chapters contributes illustrations of how information technologies and
socio-technical systems affect the flow of private information and cause privacy concerns. At the beginning,
the author effectively presents different modalities of monitoring and tracking technologies, and captures the
fact that advances in digital media have escalated public concerns about privacy. The following chapter covers
the technological capacities to aggregate and analyze personal information through database technologies.
The last chapter of Part I raises issues related to distributing, disclosing, and spreading the capacity of digital
information technologies, mostly regarding the Internet and its services such as Google Street View and
Facebook.
Part II provides some of the most significant and influential scholarly contributions to discussions of privacy,
focusing on what privacy is and why it matters. Chapters 4 and 5 offer theoretical explanations on how the
concept of privacy has been connected to rights and values. Chapter 5 in particular discusses the
public/private dichotomy as the foundation for a right to privacy, which becomes the theoretical basis to
advance Nissenbaums observation and evaluation of privacy concerns presented by socio-technical systems.
The authors discussion distinguishes three dimensions of privacy in an effort to articulate a right to privacy
within the public/private dichotomy: (1) actors, divided into governmental and private actors; (2) realm,
divided into the public and the private; and (3) information, divided into the public and the personal.
However, throughout Chapter 6 the author reveals some of the paradoxes, discontinuities, and trade-offs
around the right to privacy and the moral significance of privacy in digitized socio-technical systems as well as
our personal practices. Accordingly, the author urges an appreciation of the concept of privacy in public to
better understand and interpret privacy in digitized media environments.
Finally, Part III introduces Nissenbaums key theoretical proposition, contextual integrity, to serve as a
foundation for the framework of contemporary socio-technical systems. The framework of contextual
integrity essentially advocates the notion of appropriateness. Here appropriateness is conceptually
associated with a context and an informational norm. The author introduces these principle notions in
Chapter 7. Contexts and informational norms have been elaborated through the various social theories and
philosophies of Paul DiMaggio, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodore Schatzki. Contexts are recognized as
abstract representations of social structures experienced in daily life. Informational norms are characterized
by four key parameters: contexts, actors, attributes, and transmission principles, and are context-relative in
essence. Context-relative or context-appropriate flow of personal information is the central notion of the
contextual integrity proposition. The author presents the framework of contextual integrity as a model for
understanding and predicting reactions to alterations in information practices. Meanwhile, the following
chapters develop normative supports for the framework of contextual integrity with prescriptive guides.
Nissenbaums ultimate thesis is that a right to privacy is neither a right to secrecy nor a right to control but a
right to appropriate flow of personal information. In this regard, the author positions herself on the side of
the openness of information rather than the restriction of information. However, the questions the author
tries to pose are substantially matters of the context within which personal information is generated,
processed, and distributed through digitized media environments. Thus, fundamentally, it is all about the
social and political legitimacy of the flows of personal information in an information network susceptible to
privacy intrusion.
Specifically, it is a common conception that digitization of media has opened a whole new sphere in every
aspect of information processing, and has improved the accessibility and availability of information.
Accessibility and availability of information are contingent upon the vulnerability of a personal right to

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privacy. For instance, the general public consumes a variety of digital utilities at the cost of their privacy on
social networking sites, location-based smart phone applications, and so forth. Regardless of the willingness
to relinquish privacy, the users consent is forced in order to benefit from technological systems.
Furthermore, the staggering discourses on fiber-optic broadband, 4G wireless networks, and cloud
computing urge us to reexamine the validity of the current framework of understanding privacy concerns in
the digital age, and there are critical implications for public policy in protecting privacy. Therefore,
Nissenbaums efforts to attract attention to privacy concerns, and to elaborate a new framework, are not only
appropriate but also timely.
Reviewed by Sangyong Han
Doctoral Candidate, College of Communications
Pennsylvania State University