Helen Nissenbaum is a professor of Information Science and founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech, New York City. Her work focuses on societal, ethical, and political implications of digital technologies covering topics such as privacy, bias in digital systems, trust online, ethical values in design, and accountability in computational systems.

Prof. Nissenbaum’s publications, which include the books, Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015), Values at Play in Digital Games, with Mary Flanagan (MIT Press, 2014), and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010), have been translated into seven languages, including Polish, Chinese, and Portuguese. Grants from the NSF, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, McArthur Foundation, DARPA, and NSA have supported her research.

Recipient of the 2014 Barwise Prize of the American Philosophical Association, Prof. Nissenbaum has contributed to privacy-enhancing software, including TrackMeNot (for protecting against profiling based on Web search) and AdNauseam (protecting against profiling based on ad clicks). Both are free and freely available. In 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from Leuphana University at Lüneberg.

Prof. Nissenbaum holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Mathematics from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.