Contextual integrity

Contextual integrity evaluates whether information flows appropriately within social contexts. It considers the people sending, receiving, and described by information, the type of information, and the conditions governing transmission. A doctor’s office, a classroom, and a commercial platform may involve different legitimate expectations.

The framework analyzes a flow by identifying the subject, sender, recipient, information type, and transmission condition. A disclosure with permission differs from one made under confidentiality or for emergency support, even if the information is identical. This vocabulary helps make an otherwise vague privacy complaint precise. It also ties the assessment to the legitimate purposes of a context, so that a classroom’s information norms need not match those of a public debate or a commercial marketplace.

Imagine a student telling a tutor about a learning difficulty to obtain support. Compare the tutor sharing relevant information with an accessibility team under agreed conditions against sending it to a marketer. The same fact can travel along ethically different paths.

Established norms are evidence about a context, not an automatic moral endorsement. They may need revision when they preserve exclusion or fail a context’s legitimate purposes. The framework therefore asks both whether a flow departs from expectations and whether those expectations deserve to govern the practice.

In a fictional school, an accessibility team receives relevant support information under agreed confidentiality conditions. Moving the same record to a marketing partner changes the recipient and purpose. Describe both flows before judging them. Then ask whether the original norms themselves were fair: familiar practices can exclude students or demand unnecessary disclosures. Contextual integrity supports that critical question as well as the identification of surprising transfers, rather than treating every established expectation as morally authoritative.