AI + Privacy – Obfuscation | Helen Nissembaum

BOOK TITLE: Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest

AUTHOR: Prof. Helen Nissenbaum

DESCRIPTION: (Source: Bookshop.org)

With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today’s pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. 

Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves. Obfuscation will teach users to push back, software developers to keep their user data safe, and policy makers to gather data without misusing it.

Brunton and Nissenbaum present a guide to the forms and formats that obfuscation has taken and explain how to craft its implementation to suit the goal and the adversary. They describe a series of historical and contemporary examples, including radar chaff deployed by World War II pilots, Twitter bots that hobbled the social media strategy of popular protest movements, and software that can camouflage users’ search queries and stymie online advertising. They go on to consider obfuscation in more general terms, discussing why obfuscation is necessary, whether it is justified, how it works, and how it can be integrated with other privacy practices and technologies.

AUTHOR BIO

Helen Nissenbaum is the Andrew H. and Ann R. Tisch Professor at Cornell Tech and in the  Information Science Department at Cornell University. She is also Director of the Digital Life Initiative, which was launched in 2017 at Cornell Tech to explore societal perspectives surrounding the development and application of digital technology, focusing on ethics, policy, politics, and quality of life. Her own research takes an ethical perspective on policy, law, science, and engineering relating to information technology, computing, digital media and data science. Topics have included privacy, trust, accountability, security, and values in technology design. 

Her books include Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest, with Finn Brunton (MIT Press, 2015) and Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford, 2010).

RELATED LINKS:

• Author website
• Why Data Privacy Based on Consent Is Impossible
• Privacy in Context | Stanford University Press
• Privacy as Contextual Integrity
• Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest | MIT Press eBooks | IEEE Xplore
• Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum: Obfuscation: a user’s guide for privacy and protest