Privacy, obfuscation, and propertization

Abstract

As our digital wake ripples out, big data is standing by to ride it, applying its analytics to make unnerving inferences about our characters, preferences, and future behavior. This paper addresses the challenge that big data presents to privacy. I examine what are perhaps the two most promising attempts to repel big data’s attack on privacy: obfuscation and the “propertization” of personal information. Obfuscation attempts to throw data collectors off our digital trail by confusing or misleading them. Propertization calls for treating personal information as intellectual property and would require that data holders compensate data subjects for any secondary use. I try to show that both defenses largely fail. I conclude that privacy is a lost cause and that we should call off the attempts to defend it from the moral point of view. I close with some thoughts about what this all means for libraries.

Privacy practices in academic libraries in Ghana: Insight into three top universities

“…This may be why some of them showed no concern for privacy. These revelations align with the position of Doyle (2018) who argues that concerns for privacy will continue to dwindle over time, especially, as libraries' adoption of digital resources from third-party vendors to deliver personalized service experience already defeats patron privacy. Singley (2020) further opines that surveillance is becoming a common practice in libraries with the adoption of learning analytics to demonstrate value and that the solution is not to avoid surveillance but to ensure that users are aware of when and how they are being monitored.…”

“…The significance of privacy to the role and operation of libraries has been a subject of ongoing discussions. Recent interests like the attention given to the subject in the third issue of the 2018 volume of the IFLA Journal is an indication of how relevant and crucial privacy is in this era, even though scholars like Doyle (2018) are convinced it is a lost cause. Legislations like the PATRIOT Act in the USA (Hess et al, 2015), Security of Canada Information Sharing Act (Jeske et al, 2016) and similar laws in Europe which threaten to invade patron privacy and confidentiality, coupled with the digital space that most libraries now operate in (Reid, 2019), have driven libraries to renew their commitment to safeguarding the interest of their patrons.…”

An onion with layers of hope and fear: A cross‐case analysis of the media representation of Tor Network reflecting theoretical perspectives of new technologies

“…With layers of encryption, Tor is a complex traffic system that makes the route between user and data untraceable through layers of encryption 17 . In the case of Tor, volunteer relays around the globe compose a network of thousands of machines randomly combined in circuits 18 to obfuscate geo‐surveillance 19 …”

Hiding opinions by minimizing disclosed information: an obfuscation-based opinion dynamics model

“…In the past few decades, most obfuscation studies were conducted in the computer science domain, especially software engineering, where code obfuscation is a very popular topic (You & Yim, 2010 ). More recently, philosophers and social scientists started to pay attention to obfuscation with a special interest in how obfuscation can be used to defend one’s privacy on the Internet (Brunton & Nissenbaum, 2015 ; Davis, 2019 ; Doyle, 2018 ), and how obfuscation mitigates unfavorable moral reactions to morally disreputable economic exchanges (Rossman, 2014 ; Schilke & Rossman, 2018 ; Wherry et al, 2019 ).…”