Privacy Expectations In the Wild: Integrating Contextual Integrity and Governing Knowledge Commons for Empirical Research

Abstract

The privacy-by-design initiative calls for the adoption of a socially meaningful conception of privacy that meets people’s expectations and is ethically defensible. In this regard, the contextual integrity (CI) theory of privacy has served as a useful framework to study normative expectations. In practical applications, the concept of a “transmission principle,” one of CI’s key parameters, has proven difficult to operationalize.

This paper demonstrates how the Governance Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework can help to resolve these difficulties. Specifically, we used aims, conditions, and consequences from the GKC institutional grammar to interpret the CI transmission principle. We applied this approach in a survey of 609 U.S. individuals to measure their privacy perceptions and expectations regarding home IoT devices. Our results reveal systematic differences in respondents’ privacy expectations depending on their governance preferences, established according to the GKC framework.