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Finn Brunton
Gildan Media Corporation

Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

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AuthorFinn Brunton
PublisherGildan Media Corporation
PublishedSep 12 2023
Book FormatAudio
ISBN-139781469004167
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CategoriesComputers > Internet - Online Safety & Privacy
LanguageEnglish

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Book Description

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

Finn Brunton is the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (MIT Press, 2013), Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest with Helen Nissenbaum (MIT Press, 2015), Communication with Mercedes Bunz and Paula Bialski (University of Minnesota Press/Meson, 2019), and Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Technologists, and Utopians Who Created Cryptocurrency (Princeton University Press, 2019) along with numerous articles and papers.

Research Interests

Histories and theories of technology; history of computing (pre- and post-electronic), networking, early programming, cryptography; hacking and hacker culture, free and open source software; failed technologies, vaporware, theories of hype, dead media, abandoned infrastructure; transhumanism, cosmism, cryonics, Extropians; surveillance and privacy; currencies, cryptocurrencies, transaction and payment systems, debt, alternative and experimental currencies; history of capitalism, socialist calculation problem, Cybersyn, autonomy, workerism/operaismo; ancient technologies: knots and knotting, cordage and textiles, mnemonics, metallurgy, foraging, load carriage; abolitionist projects; historiography, theories of history, Ginzburg, Braudel, Koselleck; manufacturing and logistics. Currently working on a project about the history and practices of rational utopians and their media over the last two hundred years or so.

Source: University of California, Davis and NYU Steinhardt

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