CLOSED: Special Issue on Privacy As Contextual Integrity

IEEE Security & Privacy seeks submissions for this upcoming issue.

Important Deadlines:

Submission deadline: 21 October 2025 at 11:59 PM EST

Publication: May/June 2026

Social apps, smartphones, ubiquitous computing, and now AI have profoundly transformed our daily lives, creating new challenges in how we perceive and value privacy. These changes demand not only legal and regulatory reforms but also agile methods and technical mechanisms to keep pace with evolving privacy norms.

Contextual Integrity (CI) is a privacy framework that can address such challenges, offering a viable alternative to other, increasingly infeasible, approaches, such as notice-and-choice. Importantly, CI insists that privacy not only promotes the interests and welfare of individual data subjects but, also, the integrity of social life by promoting the functions, purposes, and values of social contexts.

TOPIC SUMMARY

For this special issue, we invite papers that explore CI from a variety of perspectives, from the theoretical to the practical and applied. Recognizing the multiple disciplinary approaches that can and have been taken, we welcome papers that range from the scientific and technical to the ethical, legal, and policy. We are also open to papers that merge and bridge different perspectives, including those that combine insights from computer science, philosophy, law, ethics, policy analysis, and the social sciences.

We seek to include papers that offer critical insights and theoretical insights into CI itself with others that demonstrate solutions to specific, concrete privacy challenges, involving, for example, empirical human subjects’ research, or systems design approaches that contribute to the development of privacy-preserving standards and solutions grounded in the Contextual Integrity framework.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

Empirical qualitative and quantitative studies
Legal, social, philosophical, and ethical analysis
Policy analysis
System design and/or implementations
Theoretical and conceptual research
Cross-disciplinary research
Impact assessment studies
Comparative legal and policy studies

Submission Instructions:

For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the Author Information page. As stated in the Author Information, peer-reviewed articles should run between 4,900 to 7,200 words, including all main body, abstract, keyword, bibliography, biography, and table text. The word count should include 250 words for each table and figure. There should be no more than 15 references. The abstract word limit is 50 words. Please submit full papers through the IEEE Author Portal system, and be sure to select the special-issue or special-section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal. All submitted manuscripts will undergo a single-anonymous peer review.

In addition to submitting your paper to IEEE Security & Privacy, you are also encouraged to upload the data related to your paper to IEEE DataPort. IEEE DataPort is IEEE's data platform that supports the storage and publishing of datasets while also providing access to thousands of research datasets. Uploading your dataset to IEEE DataPort will strengthen your paper and will support research reproducibility. Your paper and the dataset can be linked, providing a good opportunity for you to increase the number of citations you receive. Data can be uploaded to IEEE DataPort prior to submitting your paper or concurrent with the paper submission. Thank you!