Privacy as Contextual Integrity, but Now on the Tongue

[2026] Scenery in front of my office | Yeoui-do, Seoul, South Korea

Looking back, when I was working on my second article, the one on privacy fatigue, my idea of privacy rested on two old foundations.

The first came from an American judge: the "right to be let alone" (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The second came from Professor Alan Westin, the right to decide where your personal information goes, who handles it, and how it flows (Westin, 1967). These are classical ideas. They're clean, they're defensible, and they sit comfortably inside the cybersecurity world I work in (in my opinion! :)).

Then there's Helen Nissenbaum, of Cornell Tech, who framed it differently. For her, privacy isn't about secrecy at all. It's about the appropriate flow of information, information moving in a way that fits its context (Nissenbaum, 2004). Handing your health records to a doctor feels perfectly natural. Handing the same records to a colleague at work? You hesitate. Nothing about the information changed. Only the context did.

These days, living through the upheaval AI is bringing, I've come to believe she had it right.

In compliance, sure, it still comes down to the familiar checkboxes: the data has to be (1) identifiable, and (2) tied to a living person (and even that varies by country). But those are the floor, not the ceiling. As the value we place on a human being keeps rising, we owe privacy more than checkboxes. We owe it the attention the philosophers and humanists give it, people like Nissenbaum.

And here is where it gets interesting.

As AI reaches toward our body (e.g. AI glasses), I keep finding myself drawn to taste, the quiet, underexplored sense next to sight, sound, touch, and smell. For the most part, it seems to have lived in the lab with controlled settings, rather than the real world.

But taste is not just one more sense to digitize. The researchers who actually pipe taste onto the tongue have described it as a sense that can only be activated from within the body (Vi et al., 2023) and you can see why. A taste is perceived before you can refuse it. It lands on you. And it can quietly bend your behaviour before you even notice: a sour note can nudge a person toward more risk (Vi & Obrist, 2018).

Now think about the machines arriving today. They don't just sense us, the way a step counter logs a walk or a location tag drops a pin. They've started to act on our perception, choosing what reaches us, and when. And that is the moment a strange little question is born:

Was that allowed?

For data, we've spent decades building a vocabulary to answer it (e.g. permission, scope, revocation, override). The senses are further behind, but no one's been asleep: scholars are already arguing for new rights over the brain and nervous system (Ienca & Andorno, 2017). That same instinct will reach the tongue. It's only a matter of when.

And this is where Nissenbaum walks back into the room.

A taste intervention is a flow too, running from a private inference about you straight onto your tongue. So her question about information becomes one we're only just learning to ask about the body. Not "is this taste pleasant?" That's the easy one. The real one: did this flow belong here? Her framework stops being a privacy theory and quietly becomes a lens for the senses.

And if appropriateness depends on context, the same salted dish can be two different things. At a friend's table, a gift. When an algorithm salts it for you, unasked, a violation. Same dish, different context, and everything hangs on that difference.

Here's the part that excites me most: the pieces are already on the table: On one side, researchers like Cornelio and Haggard have spent years measuring our sense of agency, that gut feeling of "I did that" (Haggard et al., 2002; Cornelio Martinez et al., 2017). On the other, people like Vi and Ranasinghe have built the hardware that puts taste under digital control, from devices that deliver flavour to the tongue to systems that transmit it electrically (Ranasinghe et al., 2011; Vi et al., 2023).

So it is never that nobody has looked. Sense of agency teaches us to measure "did I do this?" Now, the road I see turns those same instruments toward a different question:

Did I allow this?

I see a gap; thanks for the senior researchers, who were struggling with capturing the right context for privacy. It might be turning out that we are standing at the very dawn of this one. I must admit that I need to read more literature not to pre-determine too early.

-- References

Cornelio Martinez, P. I., De Pirro, S., Vi, C. T., & Subramanian, S. (2017). Agency in mid-air interfaces. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2426–2439). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025457

Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 5(4), 382–385. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn827

Ienca, M., & Andorno, R. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life Sciences, Society and Policy, 13, Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1

Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington Law Review, 79(1), 119–157.

Ranasinghe, N., Karunanayaka, K., Cheok, A. D., Fernando, O. N. N., Nii, H., & Gopalakrishnakone, P. (2011). Digital taste and smell communication. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Body Area Networks (BodyNets), 78–84.

Vi, C. T., & Obrist, M. (2018). Sour promotes risk-taking: An investigation into the effect of taste on risk-taking behaviour in humans. Scientific Reports, 8, Article 7987. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-26164-3

Vi, C. T., Cornelio, P., Obrist, M., & Yeomans, M. (2023). "Sweet: I did it!" Measuring the sense of agency in gustatory interfaces. Frontiers in Computer Science, 5, Article 1128229. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2023.1128229

Warren, S. D., & Brandeis, L. D. (1890). The right to privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4(5), 193–220.

Westin, A. F. (1967). Privacy and freedom. Atheneum.