Helen Nissenbaum

The book a collection of starting points for understanding and making use of obfuscation.
It is split into two parts - an analysis of the possible applications of obfuscation and obfuscation as a strategy for privacy protection; the ethical issues obfuscation raises and salient questions to ask of any obfuscation project. The authors took care to emphasize that in addition to privacy, it is not a replacement for one or all of the tools which we already rely on.
There is no simple solution to the problem of privacy, because privacy itself is a solution to societal challenges that are in constant movement.… (mehr)

This was disappointing.

This book has two parts. The first part (chapter 1 and 2) is an introduction to obfuscation and has lots of examples. It's a great introduction, a mind-expanding survey of the design space for obfuscation techniques. Unfortunately, that's where the practical bit ends. With part two, the book devolves into armchair-theorising about the ethics and ontology of obfuscation.

Chapter 3 says some interesting things about information asymmetries. The authors quote Anthony Gidden's idea of manufactured risk to state that surveillance doesn't just reduce risk, it also exports it. For example, data collection by credit agencies may protect us from one class of risks (insurance at lower premiums), but create another class of risks (hacking of collected data, sharing without consent, so on). Further, data collection usually reduces risk for the many at the expense of increased risk for the few (and this increased risk is distributed differently along different socio-economic axes, mostly affecting the already marginalised). The authors also mention James C Scott's book Weapons of the Weak on peasant resistance against asymmetric power relations and promises that this book continues in the same vein to show how obfuscation can be a tool of protest against information-asymmetric relationships of power (it hardly does, and I really wish it did).

The main takeaways of chapter 4 were ethical guiding principles for applying obfuscation; they make the utilitarian argument ("blocking a data flow is unethical only when the data flow is ethically required"), the contextual integrity argument ("inappropriate flow of information/ legitimate use of obfuscation is normative") and the individualist argument ("how much privacy should the individual have to sacrifice for the common good?"). Nothing novel or ground-breaking.

Chapter 5 has six similar-sounding goals obfuscation achieves and four obvious questions to ask yourself if you're designing an obfuscation system. There are some practical titbits here and there in this book and but it largely fails to deliver on the promise of being a "user's guide". It's more of a "philosopher's guide" than anything else.… (mehr)