# Contextual Integrity **Domain:** Privacy / Information Ethics / AI Assistants **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developing **Concept Hub:** [[wiki/Regime-Conditioned Semantics|Regime-Conditioned Semantics]] **Aliases:** privacy as contextual integrity ## Definition **Contextual integrity is Helen Nissenbaum's framework defining privacy as the appropriateness of information flows to the norms of the context in which they occur, specified by sender, recipient, subject, information type and transmission principle.** Introduced in the *Washington Law Review* (2004) and formalized with Barth, Datta and Mitchell (2006), it has since been operationalized for large language models and assistants (Mireshghallah et al., ICLR 2024; Ghalebikesabi et al., 2024) and critiqued for superficial use (Shvartzshnaider and Duddu, 2025). ## Role in the Corpus [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]] uses contextual integrity to redefine privacy under machine regime as "boundary governance over inference and transfer": the harm lies in recombination across contexts that alters a person's prices, opportunities and affordances. ## Relationships - **Concepts:** [[wiki/Surveillance|Surveillance]] · [[wiki/Surveillance Pricing|Surveillance Pricing]] · [[wiki/Mental Privacy|Mental Privacy]] · [[wiki/Regime-Conditioned Semantics|Regime-Conditioned Semantics]] · [[wiki/Affordance Allocation|Affordance Allocation]]. - **Source article:** [[articles/The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime|The New Dictionary of the Machine Regime]]. ## Sources / Provenance - Helen Nissenbaum, ["Privacy as Contextual Integrity"](https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/Privacy%20as%20Contextual%20Integrity.pdf) (*Washington Law Review* 79:1, 2004). - Niloofar Mireshghallah et al., ["Can LLMs Keep a Secret?"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17884) (ICLR 2024). - Yan Shvartzshnaider and Vasisht Duddu, ["Position: Contextual Integrity Washing for Language Models"](https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19173) (2025).