Helen Nissenbaum
American philosopher and information scientist
Helen Fay Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Chaired professor of information science at Cornell Tech. She is best known for the concept of "contextual integrity" and her work on privacy, privacy law, trust, and security in the online world. Specifically, contextual integrity has influenced the United States government's thinking about privacy issues. Nissenbaum co-created the TrackMeNot and AdNauseam browser extensions, which demonstrated the use of obfuscation to maintain user privacy.
Early life and education
Nissenbaum studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, graduating in 1976. She then went on to study at Stanford University, where she completed a master's degree in the social science of education in 1978, and a PhD in philosophy in 1983.
Work
Grants
Nissenbaum has received grants from the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In 2018, Nissenbaum was invited to serve on the first ever external ethics Advisory Panel for Artificial Intelligence at SAP SE —the first European technology company to have an external AI ethics advisory panel.
Contextual Integrity
Nissenbaum is well known as the creator of the contextual integrity benchmark for privacy as an alternative to theories of privacy grounded in secrecy, data minimization, or procedural models based exclusively on notice-consent practices or encryption. One author stated that her article “Privacy as Contextual Integrity" has been "arguably the most influential article ever written about privacy in terms of shaping the direction of privacy research and its literature.”
Contextual integrity is defined as the appropriate flow of information from one party to the next, where what is appropriate is based on the social norms and expectations of an informational context.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13515758. VIAF identifies the subject as 34696927. The Library of Congress control number is n85362957. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1978, 1983 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Helen Nissenbaum” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.