Abstract
The collection, aggregation, analysis, and dissemination of personal information permit unnerving inferences about our characters, preferences, and future behavior that were inconceivable just a couple of decades ago. This paper looks primarily at online searching and the commercial harvesting of personal information there. I argue that our best hope for protecting privacy online is anonymity through obfuscation. Obfuscation attempts to throw data collectors off one’s digital trail by making personal data less useful. However, anonymous web searching has costs. I examine two of the most serious and urge that they are worth paying in the light of the heavy toll the commercial gathering and analysis of our information takes on privacy and autonomy. I close with some thoughts on (1) how individual, rational decisions have led to a surveillance regime that few would have chosen beforehand and (2) the alleged autonomy of information technology.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Winner and especially Rule are critical of the notion of autonomous technology.
- 2.
I would like to thank Jane Carter, Don Fallis, and Catherine Womack for their comments. Also, I presented earlier versions of this paper at the 2016 Information Ethics Roundtable, held at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and at the 2016 annual meeting of the International Association of Computing and Philosophy, held at the University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy. I would like to thank participants for their feedback.
References
Angwin, J. 2014. Dragnet nation: A quest for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance. New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company.
Angwin, J., and E. Steel. 2011, February 28. What they know: A wall street journal investigation: Web’s hot new commodity: Privacy. The Wall Street Journal, p. A1.
Aquisti, A. 2014. The economics and behavioral economics of privacy. In Lane 2014.
Barbaro, M., and T. Zeller. 2006, August 9. A face is exposed for AOL searcher no. 4417749. The New York Times, A1.
Barocas, S., and H. Nissenbaum. 2014. Big data’s end run around anonymity and consent. In Privacy, big data, and the public good: Frameworks for engagement, ed. J. Lane, V. Stodden, S. Bender, and H. Nissenbaum, 44–75. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brunton, F., and H. Nissenbaum. 2011. Vernacular resistance to data collection and analysis: A political theory of obfuscation. First Monday 16 (5).
———. 2013. Political and ethical perspectives on data obfuscation. In Privacy, due process and the computational turn: The philosophy of law meets the philosophy of technology, ed. M. Hildebrandt and K. De Vries, 164–188. New York: Routledge.
Cohen, J. 2000. Examined lives: Information privacy and the subject as object. Stanford Law Review 52 (5): 1373–1438.
Duhigg, C. 2009, May 17. What does your credit-card company know about you? New York Times Magazine, 40–45.
Ellul, J. 1989. What I believe. Trans by G. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Gandy, O. 1993. The panoptic sort: A political economy of personal information. Boulder: The Westview Press.
Howe, D., and H. Nissenbaum. 2009. Trackmenot: Resisting surveillance in web search. In Lessons from the identity trail: Anonymity, privacy, and identity in a networked society, ed. I. Kerr, C. Lucock, and V. Steeves, 418–436. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahn, A. 1966. The tyranny of small decisions: Market failures, imperfections, and the limits of economics. Kyklos 19 (1): 23–47.
Mayer-Schönberger, V., and K. Cukier. 2013. Big data: A revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Boston and New York.
Moor, J. 1990. The ethics of privacy protection. Library Trends 39 (1–2): 69–82.
Nissenbaum, H. 1998. Protecting privacy in the information age: The problem of privacy in public. Law and Philosophy 17 (5–6): 559–596.
———. 1999. The meaning of anonymity in an information age. The Information Society 15 (2): 141–144.
———. 2010. Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford: Stanford Law.
———. 2011. A contextual approach to privacy online. Daedalus 140 (4): 32–48.
Oberhauser, K. 2011. Monarch butterfly. In Environmental encyclopedia, vol. 2, 4th ed., 1091–1093. Gale: Detroit.
Ohm, P. 2010. Broken promises of privacy: Responding to the surprising failure of anonymization. UCLA Law Review 57 (6): 1701–1777.
———. 2014. Changing the rules: General principles for data use and analysis. In Privacy, big data, and the public good: Frameworks for engagement, ed. J. Lane, V. Stodden, S. Bender, and H. Nissenbaum, 96–111. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Posner, Richard. 1978a. The economic theory of privacy. Regulation 19 (2): 19–26.
———. 1978b. The right to privacy. Georgia Law Review 12 (3): 393–422.
———. 1979. Privacy, secrecy, and reputation. Buffalo Law Review 28 (1): 1–55.
———. 1981a. The economics of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Press.
———. 1981b. The economics of privacy. The American Economic Review 71 (2): 405–409.
Rule, J. 2007. Privacy in peril. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schneier, B. 2015. Data and Goliath: The hidden battles to capture your data and control your world. New York: W.W. Norton.
Singer, N. 2013, September 1. A data broker offers a peek behind the curtain. New York Times, BU1.
Steel, E., and J. Angwin. 2010, August 4. On the web’s cutting edge, anonymity in name only. The Wall Street Journal, A1.
Tavani, H., and J. Moor. 2001. Privacy protection, control of information, and privacy-enhancing technologies. Computers and Society 31 (1): 6–11.
Throsby, D. 2015. Trust funds. TLS 5861: 28.
Walker, J. 2013, December 17. Data mining to recruit sick people. Wall Street Journal.
Wallace, K. 1999. Anonymity. Ethics and Information Technology 1 (1): 23–25.
Winner, L. 1977. Autonomous technology: Technics-out-of-control as a theme in political thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Winner, L. 1980. Do artifacts have politics? 109 (1): 121–136.
Zimmer, M. 2010. “But the data is already public:” On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology 12: 313–325.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Doyle, T. (2019). Obfuscation and Strict Online Anonymity. In: Berkich, D., d'Alfonso, M. (eds) On the Cognitive, Ethical, and Scientific Dimensions of Artificial Intelligence. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01800-9_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01800-9_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01799-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01800-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)