Addressing privacy challenges in healthcare through the lens of contextual integrity

[Note: The slide presentation is not available from this event.] In healthcare, as in other social spheres, digital technology has posed dire challenges to entrenched approaches to privacy. Yet, as a fundamental cornerstone of ethical healthcare, privacy cannot be allowed to erode. The theory of contextual integrity (CI), which defines privacy as appropriate flow of personal information answers the need for a meaningful concept of privacy that, simultaneously explains its value to individuals and to societies. CI requires that we bend away from one-dimensional ideas, which for decades have gripped the privacy domain, namely, control over information about ourselves, stoppage of flow, or fetishization of specific, "sensitive" attributes (e.g., identity, health). This lecture will review key ideas behind CI, contrast it with alternative accounts, and apply these ideas to the domain of intensive health care and health research domains, distinctive not only for their societal importance but for their ages-long attentiveness to privacy.