Engineering Privacy and Protest: a Case Study of AdNauseam
- CityUHK Scholars
Daniel C. Howe, Helen Nissenbaum
CityUHK Scholars·2025
The strategy of obfuscation has been broadly applied—in search, location tracking, private communication, anonymity—and has thus been recognized as an important element of the privacy engineer’s toolbox. However, there remains a need for clearly articulated case studies describing not only the engineering of obfuscation mechanisms but, further, providing a critical appraisal of obfuscation’s fit for specific socio-technical applications. This is the aim of our paper, which presents our experiences designing, implementing, and distributing AdNauseam, an open-source browser extension that leverages obfuscation to frustrate tracking by online advertisers.