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The authors provide thirteen “core cases” of obfuscation in practice. These cases clarify what obfuscation does in particular scenarios across a variety of technologies and social, legal, and political contexts. While the cases are diverse -- including radar chaff, “false tells” in poker, and collective identity drawn from popular culture and historical applications -- the focus is on digital data and online activism illustrated through instances, such as concealing activity on social networks, protecting search queries, and providing aid to activists involved in the release of Nelson Mandela.

The authors provide an additional eighteen examples of obfuscation. By contrast with the core cases of I.1, these examples are broader and more varied in their application, including speculative design projects, patents, file-sharing tools, and business and financial strategies. This section does not expand the fundamental lexicon of what obfuscation is and does, but instead shows how it is applied to specific kinds of challenges, including textual stylometry, facial recognition, loyalty cards, criminal investigations, and software code.

This chapter concisely defines obfuscation in terms of data, and information and power asymmetries. What can those whose data is being collected know and do about how data about them is captured, accumulated, transmitted, analysed, and used? Discussing these challenges creates the context for the necessity of obfuscation in the larger domain of privacy strategies and techniques, including governmental regulation, business best practice, and purely technological solutions. The authors argue that “opting out” to protect private data is not a reasonable solution, and build on James C. Scott’s concept of “Weapons of the Weak” to distinguish obfuscation from other privacy approaches.

This chapter takes up moral and ethical arguments for and against obfuscation. Is obfuscation a form of lying, a waste of resources or a kind of pollution, an act of free riding on the willingness of others to disclose data about themselves, or even an attack on a data collection system itself? The authors discuss each of these objections in turn, urging readers to look beyond these immediate challenges toward deeper issues of ethical means and ends, and “informational justice” (drawing on the work of Rawls, in particular). It considers the moral obligations individuals owe, or do not owe, to data collectors, and vice versa. Finally, the authors turn to the distribution of risk in the collection of data, and discuss obfuscation as a strategy for equitably redistributing risk.

This chapter takes up the question of how obfuscation strategies should be designed, measured, assessed, and improved. To answer, it describes different approaches to obfuscation in terms of threats and adversaries: what is the nature of the challenge a particular application of obfuscation should meet? In these terms, every obfuscation strategy can be described with six goals (from “buying time” to “expressing protest”) and four questions (from “individual or collective?” to “short-term or long-term?”). These goals and questions are the framework for the design of specific obfuscation efforts.