Obfuscators Gonna Obfuscate
“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.” (G.K. Chesterton)
The New York Times featured a video series this week from Jaron Lanier about data dignity, which at one point appeared under the headline “I Want You to get Paid $20,000 for Clicking That Ad.” I highly recommend the first video as an introduction to why the internet needs to be fixed. The second video features one of Jaron’s central ideas for “fixing the internet,” which is to pay you real cash money for the data you create online. In the video, a couple posts a selfie with their newborn to “SnapGram,” then gleefully pulls down three floppy one-dollar bills from the advertising cloud in exchange for the data:
As I watched the videos, I kept thinking about how Brunton and Nissenbaum’s vision for data dignity felt so much more realistic than Jaron Lanier’s. We definitely need thinkers like Jaron who offer creative long-term paths to data dignity, but we also need realistic steps to take in the meantime. Brunton and Nissenbaum say right from the start of their book that, rather than advocating for major social upheaval, they want to start a revolution with tools that are “ready at hand.” They frame their strategies as “weapons of the weak,” a term borrowed from anthropologist James C Scott.
Weapons of the weak are necessary when people are deprived of traditional forms of political negotiation and/or resistance (voting, money, protest). When power structures (political or corporate) reach a certain point of impenetrability, we must “broaden the spectrum of responses to oppression and coercion,” (pg. 57) and one way to do that is obfuscation.
What is obfuscation?
The central idea of obfuscation is simple andpowerful: rather than erase yourself entirely from the internet, you can create additional data and leave “a trail of confusion” that makes it much more difficult for companies to identify and follow you online. For example, some spiders create decoys within their webs to protect themselves from predators, a biological example of obfuscation.
The book is a few years old, so some of the tools and examples are no longer available, but new tools that apply the principle are still available today. In fact, just a couple months ago, Firefox released Track This, a tool that exemplifies obfuscation perfectly. Instead of just deleting your cookies (i.e. trying to erase yourself), Track This creates a “trail of confusion” that minimizes what online trackers know about you. For example, the “filthy rich” option will open websites from property listings in Beverly Hills, to luxury car websites like BMW and BUGATTI, yachts, swiss watches, all the way to premium credit cards with annual fees upwards of $1,000 (this one is made with 24K-gold-plated stainless steel).
With these websites in your browsing history, the online surveillance algorithms will infer that you have money you want to spend on real estate, swiss watches, luxury cards, and (my favorite) gold-plated credit cards that cost $1,000 per year. Companies will then spend gobs of money to put advertisements for these products in front of you, which you’ll see in your browser shortly after using Track This.
(If you are thinking to yourself “well I want to be tracked so I can see more relevant advertisements,” you’ll have to wait for a future post.)
Until we have an infrastructure to pay people for their data, I don’t find it a very meaningful step towards data dignity. As of right now, tools like Track This and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are better steps towards privacy and data dignity, simply because they are real. I highly recommend Brunton and Nissenbaum’s book for anyone interested learning more about obfuscation.
