Obfuscation and its Discontents: DIY Privacy from Card Swap to Browser Hack

Presented at HOPE X (2014), July 18, 2014, noon (60 minutes).

Data collection, aggregation, and mining have dramatically changed the nature of contemporary surveillance. Refusal is not a practical option, as data collection is an inherent condition of many essential societal transactions. In this talk, we discuss one response to this type of everyday surveillance, a tactic called obfuscation. Tactical obfuscation can be defined as the strategy of producing misleading, false, or ambiguous data with the intention of confusing and/or inhibiting an adversary. Because obfuscation is relatively flexible in its use by average citizens as well as by experts, it holds promise as a strategy for DIY privacy and security. This talk presents a brief overview of obfuscation as political theory, including contemporary and historical examples, then focuses on two recent systems that address data collection: TrackMeNot, which shields searchers from surveillance and data profiling, and Ad-Nauseam, which targets advertising networks that track users across the web. The talk concludes with a consideration of the ethics of obfuscation as representative of a class of strategies whereby weaker parties can both protect against and confront stronger adversaries.


Presenters:

  • Daniel C. Howe
    Daniel C. Howe is an artist, writer, coder, and critical technologist, whose work focuses on the aesthetic and political implications of computational technologies. He currently lives in Hong Kong.

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