Surveillance Countermeasures: Expressive Privacy via Obfuscation

The ubiquity of the web-browser as an interface to the web, and to digital content in general, has by now surpassed that of any other software entity. Some designers have even made the case that the browser represents a key locus for the inculcation of obedience in contemporary society. On each page we are forced to learn or adhere to the rules of a different set of site designers or administrators without any say whatsoever in what those rules might be (Zer-Aviv). Whether or not one accepts such claims, the browser remains a key focal point for much of the surreptitious data gathering and surveillance that pervade the web. As researchers have shown, there are a multitude of vectors by which corrupt advertisers, repressive governments, and other malicious players can attack the browser to identify its user and access valuable personal data without consent. Due to the breadth of the attack surface that the browser provides, there is little that the average users can do to defend themselves. If you are not identified and tracked by cookies, ad-malware, tracking-code, or browser fingerprinting, then caching and timing attacks are likely to get you in the end (Janc and Zalewski). One avenue that has shown promise in frustrating data collection in the browser, however, has been obfuscation. Obfuscation, defined as “[t]he production, inclusion, addition, or communication of misleading, ambiguous, or false data in an effort to evade, distract, or confuse data gatherers or diminish the reliability (and value) of data aggregations” (Brunton and Nissenbaum), has in part proven successful as a strategy due to the ubiquity of the browser itself. While a web service provider may be able to filter out unwanted requests from individuals, it is far more difficult when tens of thousands of different users are attempting to pollute their captured data in this way. As such, obfuscation may represent a useful avenue of resistance against contemporary datafication in online space.