Group Oriented Strategic Technologies for Adversarial Privacy Enhancement

Abstract

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have long been divided according to the role of trust in their design, with “hard” PETs distinguished in particular by an aim to minimize trust. This work adopts a different perspective on PETs, and describes the class of group-oriented strategic technologies for adversarial privacy enhancement (GOSTAPEs) focused on the long term causes and conditions of privacy over time. The work then motivates GOSTAPEs as a research agenda for PET design. A survey of the PET landscape from the hard-/soft- PET perspective is presented first, with the rest of the work falling to separate discussion of group-orientation, adversariality, and strategy. Throughout, the discussion of GOSTAPEs focuses on technologies of measurement, including a botnet used to measure privacy practices on the web, a public transparency and reputation system for data brokers, and a formal measure of database privacy risk based on plausible deniability. The work concludes by gathering themes from the strategic perspective that have emerged, and looking to the future of PET design.