<p>Making one’s information publicly available does not necessarily remove all privacy protections. It is well-known that an individual can be identified from a few data points of publicly available data about the individual. Privacy protections most obviously apply as duties that limit the intentional collection of publicly available information for a privacy-infringing purpose. What is unclear is whether privacy protections also apply in cases where the collection is for purposes that do not infringe privacy, but that cause others to involuntarily infer a privacy-infringing conclusion about an individual. The aim of this paper is to distinguish a type of involuntary inference which I call “irresistible inference”. This distinction allows us to distinguish involuntary inferences for which duties of restraint and inattention are possible from those for which the duties are psychologically impossible. Within a framework of contextual integrity, irresistible inference to some privacy-infringing conclusions can imply that the privacy right is normatively idle and reasoning with other ethical reasons than privacy is more practically useful.</p>