Acknowledgments

This book began with technology—the TrackMeNot project—and we owe our deepest thanks to Daniel Howe, who got it on its feet, and Vincent Toubiana, who joined the effort, expanded its scope, and continues tirelessly to support it and its adopters. Feedback and comments from the community of users and from the privacy community at large, and a joint technical paper with Lakshminarayanan Subramanian (Vincent Toubiana, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Helen Nissenbaum, “TrackMeNot: Enhancing the Privacy of Web Search”) have opened our eyes to its potential and limitations. More recently, creating and launching a second system, AdNauseam, with Daniel Howe, in collaboration with the designer Mushon Zer-Aviv, further expanded our perspective on obfuscation and on the need for a deeper, systematic appreciation of what it offers as a method and a strategy.

As we began to work on a general understanding of obfuscation, we were able to explore many of the concepts in a paper published in First Monday and a chapter in Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn, which benefited enormously from review and editorial feedback in those venues.

Obfuscation became a book with the encouragement and thorough advice of the reviewers and of Marguerite Avery, Gita Manaktala, Susan Buckley, Katie Helke, and Paul Bethge at the MIT Press. Our thanks to all of them. Emily Goldsher-Diamond did meticulous work as a research assistant, as well as organizing many other aspects of this project. Work on this book through all its drafts was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (ITR- 0331542: Sensitive Information in a Wired World), from EAGER (CNS-1355398: Values in Design for Future Internet Architecture—Next Phase), from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (MURI-ONR BAA 07-036: Collaborative Policies and Assured Information Sharing), and from the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. Support from these grants provided time, technology, and a collegial context for pursuing this project and bringing it to fruition.

Two major events helped shape and refine our thinking about obfuscation. One was the Symposium on Obfuscation (February 15, 2014), jointly organized by New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and the Information Law Institute and co-sponsored by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing. For making this event possible, we would like to thank Nicole Arzt, Emily Goldsher-Diamond, Dove Helena Pedlosky, Melissa Lucas-Ludwig, Erica Robles-Anderson, and Jamie Schuler—and, above all, Seda Gürses, who organized, structured, and shaped so much of the day. Every single speaker had a direct effect on our manuscript. The other event was the ongoing conversation of the Privacy Research Group at NYU, at whose weekly seminars we presented several stages of this material. The book would not have this final form without the PRG discussions; our fond thanks to everyone involved.

Other opportunities to present and test aspects of this work have been enormously productive, and our ideas have been greatly improved by the responses of supporters, critics, believers, and skeptics. These opportunities have included a joint MIT Center for Civic Media and Comparative Media Studies Colloquium; The New School for Social Research 2014 Graduate Conference; New Media Salon, Tel Aviv; Communications and Journalism Departmental Seminar, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; IBM R&D Labs, Haifa; Eyebeam Art + Technology Center; HotPETS 2013; Computers, Privacy and Data Protection, Brussels; and the Surveillance Studies Conference, Queens University.

We are deeply grateful for friends and colleagues with whom we could discuss obfuscation as it developed, and who offered feedback, criticism, encouragement, and ideas. In particular we would like to thank Julia Angwin, Solon Barocas, danah boyd, Claudia Diaz, Cynthia Dwork, Cathy Dwyer, Tarleton Gillespie, Mireille Hildebrandt, Ari Juels, Nick Montfort, Deirdre Mulligan, Arvind Narayanan, Martijn van Otterloo, Ira Rubinstein, Ian Spiro, Luke Stark, Katherine Strandburg, Matthew Tierney, Joe Turow, Janet Vertesi, Tal Zarsky, Malte Ziewitz, and Ethan Zuckerman.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the support of our professional home base, the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Thanks to you all!