Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest

A handbook for resisting data collection by adding noise to it, written for ordinary users who cannot opt out of surveillance by corporations and governments.

Brunton and Nissenbaum define obfuscation as the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing or misleading information to interfere with surveillance. They draw on cases from radar chaff dropped by Second World War pilots to Twitter bots that disrupted protest hashtags and software that masks search queries, then ask whether such tactics are justified and how they can be combined with other privacy practices and tools. The MIT Press edition was published in September 2015.

When the book appeared, Finn Brunton taught media, culture and communication at New York University, and Helen Nissenbaum was a professor there and directed its Information Law Institute. Brunton is also the author of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet.