Doctoral Dissertation Research: An Ethnography of Privacy Engineering in U.S. Web Browser Development

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A broad array of recent developments in technology, business, government, and popular culture have transformed digital surveillance into an inescapable fact of everyday life. This has contributed to the widespread perception that privacy may no longer be capable of fulfilling its traditional role in American politics: preserving and promoting individual liberty, dignity, and self-expression. In response, government, academic, civil society, and private sector institutions have launched an unprecedented number of technology-based projects designed to protect privacy for future generations. In this context, understanding the conditions under which technological design and engineering can meaningfully contribute to privacy protections is critical for developing programs and policies that can unlock the economic, scientific, and societal potential of new data technologies while still guaranteeing Americans' access to privacy's personal, political, and cultural benefits. Findings from this project, which trains a graduate student in methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, will be disseminated to organizations that manage and develop policy related to privacy.Lake Polan, under the guidance of anthropologist Dr. Joseph P. Masco of the University of Chicago, will investigate the efforts of Silicon Valley-based technology corporations to preserve privacy on the Internet using design and engineering. The project will be carried out through twelve months of research, including eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco headquarters of Mozilla and one month of interviewing technologists, regulators, and other stakeholders in Washington, D.C. Mozilla is a well-known not-for-profit technology corporation, which develops Firefox, the third most popular web browser in the U.S. As a matter of official corporate policy, Mozilla is committed to protecting the privacy of users of Firefox and of the Internet in general. Through long-term, first person observation, the project will explore Mozilla's efforts to honor this principle by engineering privacy directly "into" the features and properties of its web browsing software. Mozilla's self-identified role as a leader in the industry-wide effort to enhance Internet privacy protections will enable project researchers to make a legally and socially significant assessment of the technological basis of privacy today, thus facilitating timely interventions in ongoing public policy debates about privacy, personal information, technology, and surveillance.