The theory of contextual integrity (CI) has inspired work across the legal, privacy, computer science and HCI research communities. Recognizing common interests and common challenges, the time seemed ripe for a meeting to discuss what we have learned from the projects using CI and how to move forward to leverage CI for enhancing privacy preserving systems and policies. On 11 December, 2017 the Center for Information Technology Policy hosted an inaugural workshop on Technical Applications of Contextual Integrity. The workshop gathered over twenty researchers from Princeton University, New York University, Cornell Tech, University of Maryland, Data & Society, and AI Now to present their ongoing and completed projects, discuss and share ideas, and explore successes and challenges when using the CI framework. The meeting, which included faculty, postdocs, and graduate students, was kicked off with a welcome and introduction by Ed Felten, CITP Director.
The agenda comprised of two main parts. In the first half of the workshop, representatives of various projects gave a short presentation on the status of their work, describe any challenges encountered, and lessons learned in the process. The second half included a planning session of a full day event to take place in the Spring to allow for a bigger discussion and exchange of ideas.
The workshop presentations touched on a wide variety of topics which included: ways operationalizing CI, discovering contextual norms behind children’s online activities, capturing users’ expectation towards smart toys and smart-home devices, as well as demonstrating how CI can be used to analyze regulation acts, applying CI to establish research ethics guidelines, conceptualizing privacy within common government arrangement.
More specifically:
Priya Kumar presented recent work on using the Contextual Integrity to identify gaps in children’s online privacy knowledge.
Sarah Varghese and Noah Apthorpe discussed their works on discovering privacy norms in IoT Devices using Contextual Integrity.
The roundtable discussion covered a wide range of open questions such as what are the limitations of CI as a theory, possible extensions, integration into other frameworks, conflicting interpretations of the CI parameters, possible research directions, and interesting collaboration ideas.
This a first attempt to see how much interest there is from the wider research community in a CI-focused event. We were overwhelmed with the incredible response! The participants expressed huge interest in the bigger event in Spring 2018 and put forward a number of suggestions for the format of the workshop. The initial idea is to organize the bigger workshop as a co-joint event with an established conference, another suggestion was to have it as part of a hands-on workshop that brings together industry and academia. We are really excited about the event that will bring together a large sample of CI-related research work both academically and geographically which will allow a much broader discussion.
The ultimate goal of this and other future initiatives is to foster communication between the various communities of researchers and practitioners using the theory of CI as a framework to reason about privacy and a language for sharing of ideas.
For the meantime, please check out the http://privaci.info website that will serve as a central repository for news, up to date related work for the community. We will be updating it in coming months.
We look forward to your feedback and suggestions. If you’re interested in hearing about the Spring workshop or presenting your work, want to help or have any suggestion please get in touch!
Twitter: @privaci_way
