Topics: DATA

Paper by Kirsten E. Martin and Helen Nissenbaum: “The construct of an information dichotomy has played a defining role in regulating privacy: information deemed private or sensitive typically earns high levels of protection, while lower levels of protection are accorded to information deemed public or non-sensitive. Challenging this dichotomy, the theory of contextual integrity associates privacy with complex typologies of information, each connected with respective social contexts. Moreover, it contends that information type is merely one among several variables that shape people’s privacy expectations and underpin privacy’s normative foundations. Other contextual variables include key actors – information subjects, senders, and recipients – as well as the principles under which information is transmitted, such as whether with subjects’ consent, as bought and sold, as required by law, and so forth. Prior work revealed the systematic impact of these other variables on privacy assessments, thereby debunking the defining effects of so-called private information.

In this paper, we shine a light on the opposite effect, challenging conventional assumptions about public information. The paper reports on a series of studies, which probe attitudes and expectations regarding information that has been deemed public. Public records established through the historical practice of federal, state, and local agencies, as a case in point, are afforded little privacy protection, or possibly none at all. Motivated by progressive digitization and creation of online portals through which these records have been made publicly accessible our work underscores the need for more concentrated and nuanced privacy assessments, even more urgent in the face of vigorous open data initiatives, which call on federal, state, and local agencies to provide access to government records in both human and machine readable forms. Within a stream of research suggesting possible guard rails for open data initiatives, our work, guided by the theory of contextual integrity, provides insight into the factors systematically shaping individuals’ expectations and normative judgments concerning appropriate uses of and terms of access to information.

Using a factorial vignette survey, we asked respondents to rate the appropriateness of a series of scenarios in which contextual elements were systematically varied; these elements included the data recipient (e.g. bank, employer, friend,.), the data subject, and the source, or sender, of the information (e.g. individual, government, data broker). Because the object of this study was to highlight the complexity of people’s privacy expectations regarding so-called public information, information types were drawn from data fields frequently held in public government records (e.g. voter registration, marital status, criminal standing, and real property ownership).

Our findings are noteworthy on both theoretical and practical grounds. In the first place, they reinforce key assertions of contextual integrity about the simultaneous relevance to privacy of other factors beyond information types. In the second place, they reveal discordance between truisms that have frequently shaped public policy relevant to privacy. …(More)”