Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

Helen Nissenbaum, a professor at New York University (NYU), is one of our leading researchers on the changing meaning of “privacy” in the modern age of big data and constant connection. In her influential 2010 book Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (itself reviewed in an earlier volume of this journal), Nissenbaum pioneered the theory of contextual integrity—a new conception stating that people still care about privacy even while admitting that they voluntarily supply personal data to online entities that sell it to advertisers and use it to create worryingly detailed dossiers on their personal interests. Instead of dropping out of this process in the interests of privacy, modern Internet users simply wish for more control over who exactly uses their personal data, while having some say in whether the resulting data profiles are accurate.In this slim new volume, with just ninety-eight pages of text, Nissenbaum and her NYU colleague Finn Brunton have flipped the contextual integrity concept into a matter of resistance, if you find reason to believe that mysterious data brokers have misinterpreted you as a human being upon compiling your piecemeal tidbits of data exhaust. Or, perhaps you simply want to sabotage the process and confound those who strive to know everything about you, while refusing to live an information-free lifestyle off the grid. As stated in the book's first two sentences: “We mean to start a revolution with this book. But not a big revolution—at least not at first.” The authors surmise that this can be done with tools that are already available, with no extreme changes to one's daily life required. The book works upon the surprisingly precise concept of obfuscation, which is defined on page 1 as “the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection.”The need for obfuscation is framed as passive resistance to the well-researched problem of information asymmetry—an imbalance in who knows what. There is a rapidly growing, mysterious, and unregulated industry of data brokers who compile your online information into profiles to be sold to advertisers who crave personal data for the crafting of hyper-personalized ads. These firms have striven to know everything about us, and act as if they do, but have taken steps to prevent us from knowing anything about them. In addition to not knowing who these data brokers are, we do not know how they collect our personal data, how they interpret it, and to whom they sell it. Also, we often do not know that we are being monitored or even if we are being monitored when we have reason to believe that we are. (This, by the way, is a key component of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon—the ultimate tool for social control via uncertainty.)Information asymmetry thus creates an imbalance in knowledge and power. This discussion can be seen as an extension of Nissenbaum's previous theories on how we have lost control of context in both how our information is used and how its users interpret what it means. A surprising inspiration for this book's obfuscation strategy is the infamous “plausible deniability” doctrine of the George W. Bush administration—reconceptualized here as a brilliant manipulation of data asymmetry in which someone who wants to know more about you has such a mess of information to work with that conclusions can be neither proven nor disproven. Perhaps we can do the same to data brokers who conclude that we are interested in Topic X but have no way to prove or disprove it because we have bombarded them with false signals to the point at which the conclusion is useless.Brunton and Nissenbaum's proposed methods of obfuscation are quite easy with current technological tools and they usually have historical precedents as well. In one particularly interesting example discussed in the first chapter, our modern obfuscation strategy is compared to the World War II diversion known as “chaff.” Military planes would release clouds of aluminum foil strips to confuse the enemy's radar tracking system via lots of false echoes. This was a temporary solution because the chaff would soon fall to Earth, but in the meantime the plane would have taken the opportunity to fly beyond the enemy's radar. This is a useful historical example because it exploits a known weakness in your enemy's technology.The authors then suggest some modern diversionary tactics of a similar nature. Just like the military plane found a way to avoid a lengthy detour clear around the enemy's radar range, you do not need to completely avoid using the Internet. Instead, you can create false echoes. For example, a browser plug-in called TrackMeNot does not try to prevent data brokers from tracking your search queries, which is impractical if not impossible. Instead, TrackMeNot combines your latest search query with recent queries by other people who use the service, making it look like you have searched for a whole bunch of different and unrelated topics. This exploits the enemy's weakness as it tries to build a profile of your personal interests based on false searches. A similar scheme is used by another plug-in called AdNauseam, which (in the background) clicks on every single ad shown on a web page that you are perusing. The enemy now thinks that you are interested in so many different types of products that the resulting profile of your personal shopping interests becomes useless. The authors discuss some low-tech methods as well, such as loyalty card swapping, in which the card in question collects the purchase history of several different people, thus damaging the usefulness of the data for the advertisers to whom the store sells the data.The middle sections of the book tackle possible ethical critiques of the obfuscation strategy. For example, one could conclude that manipulating data is akin to lying, and this argument is subjected to a Kantian analysis on the nature of truth. A particularly fascinating discussion in this area of the book concerns the issue of waste. Software solutions like the aforementioned TrackMeNot operate via the creation of false data, thus wasting server space and network capacity to no one's benefit. Interestingly, the authors treat this as an ethical matter of the importance of data, as the Internet is overflowing with not-so-important information already, while developers can be encouraged to design efficiency into their systems. Besides, advertisers and data brokers have already invested heavily to transform the World Wide Web into a giant surveillance platform, and the false data tidbits of a few resistance fighters pale in comparison.Toward the end of the book (Chapter 5), the authors engage in a refreshingly honest discussion of whether their new obfuscation strategies will really work. Maybe they will and maybe they won't, and this judgment depends upon one's goals. For example, if you want to confound advertisers in the short term with useless information as a passive form of protest, the strategy is likely to work. But if you would like to make bigger, longer-lasting points about the burgeoning surveillance state and corporate hegemony, no one is likely to notice your little obfuscation shenanigans. The end of the book brings us back around to Nissenbaum's contextual integrity, concluding that “obfuscation, in its humble, provisional, better-than-nothing, socially contingent way, is deeply entangled with the context of use” (p. 95). Thus, obfuscation is useful for some momentary resistance, but for bigger changes we must use obfuscation as a component of a more wide-ranging strategy. This is a rather unsatisfying end to the book, because the authors' originally intriguing new concept of resistance is ultimately as effective as a slingshot against King Kong.This reviewer also noticed a gaping hole in the obfuscation strategy, in that the authors neglected the problem of data discrimination. The strategy as described is good for confusing advertisers, perhaps to the point of making targeted ads so ineffective that they give up on the technique. But the book says little about the national security complex and its use of personal data profiles. For example, Vice News reported in early 2016 that banks and governments have used a service called World-Check that claimed to track people with terrorist sympathies based on data profiles, and included people who were merely called “terrorists” by someone who disagreed with them in a blog. These innocent people may have been denied banking services and may even have been targeted for national security investigations. Considering this book's obfuscation strategy, false data that confounds advertisers can have much more serious consequences if it contains tidbits of interest to the authorities.Meanwhile, there is growing evidence that personal data is being used by other parties that can do more with it than send you an annoying pop-up ad that you would ignore anyway. For example, it has been reported that health insurance companies decide on whether or not you get coverage, or how much it costs, based on personal data that they have purchased from data brokers. What if an obfuscation tool like AdNauseam creates the false impression that you have clicked on an ad for antidepressants when you really have not? This confuses advertisers—but your insurance company, school, or employer might act against your interests with false data that is now really being taken out of context. And thus we have lost even more contextual integrity—the concept upon which most of the authors' obfuscation strategy is based.