Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest
Summary
A short book on obfuscation: deliberately adding ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection. The first half catalogs examples, from radar chaff to TrackMeNot (a browser extension Nissenbaum co-developed that floods search engines with decoy queries). The second half asks when obfuscation is justified and how well it works.
Why it’s useful here
- Tactics for people who can’t opt out. Not everyone can leave Google or Facebook. Obfuscation is a “weapon of the weak” for living inside systems you don’t control.
- Frames privacy as protest and collective action, not only individual hygiene.
- Practical connection to guides on browser extensions, DNS filtering, and decoy traffic.
Key ideas
- Obfuscation as adding noise rather than hiding signal
- Justified when power is asymmetric and opting out isn’t realistic
- Ethical questions: free-riding, pollution of shared data, who bears the cost
Related
- nissenbaum-2010-privacy-in-context.md
- eff-surveillance-self-defense.md