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

技术、商业、政府和流行文化的一系列最新发展已经将数字监控转变为日常生活中不可避免的事实。这导致了一种普遍的看法，即隐私可能不再能够履行其在美国政治中的传统角色：保护和促进个人自由、尊严和自我表达。作为回应，政府、学术、公民社会和私营部门机构推出了数量空前的以技术为基础的项目，旨在为子孙后代保护隐私。在这种背景下，了解技术设计和工程能够对隐私保护做出有意义贡献的条件对于制定能够释放新数据技术的经济、科学和社会潜力的计划和政策至关重要，同时仍然保证美国人能够获得隐私的个人、政治和文化利益。这个项目对研究生进行实证、科学数据收集和分析方法的培训，其结果将被传播到管理和制定与隐私相关的政策的组织。在芝加哥大学人类学家约瑟夫·P·马斯科博士的指导下，波兰湖将调查硅谷科技公司如何利用设计和工程来保护互联网上的隐私。该项目将通过12个月的研究进行，其中包括在Mozilla旧金山总部进行11个月的人种学实地调查，以及在华盛顿特区采访技术专家、监管机构和其他利益相关者一个月。Mozilla是一家著名的非营利性技术公司，开发美国第三大最受欢迎的Web浏览器Firefox。作为官方公司政策，Mozilla致力于保护Firefox用户和整个互联网的隐私。通过长期的第一人称观察，该项目将探索Mozilla通过直接将隐私工程到其网络浏览软件的功能和属性中来遵守这一原则的努力。Mozilla自称是加强互联网隐私保护的全行业努力的领导者，这将使项目研究人员能够对当今隐私的技术基础进行具有法律和社会意义的评估，从而促进及时干预正在进行的关于隐私、个人信息、技术和监视的公共政策辩论。

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.