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

科技、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、学术界、公民社会和私营部门机构启动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，理解技术设计和工程能够有意义地促进隐私保护的条件，对于制定项目和政策至关重要，这些项目和政策可以释放新数据技术的经济、科学和社会潜力，同时仍然保证美国人获得隐私的个人、政治和文化利益。这个项目训练一名研究生在经验、科学数据收集和分析方面的方法，其研究结果将传播给管理和制定与隐私相关政策的组织。在芝加哥大学人类学家Joseph P. Masco博士的指导下，Lake Polan将调查硅谷科技公司利用设计和工程保护互联网隐私的努力。该项目将进行12个月的研究，包括在Mozilla旧金山总部进行11个月的人种学实地考察，以及在华盛顿特区与技术专家、监管机构和其他利益相关者进行1个月的访谈。Mozilla是一家著名的非营利性科技公司，开发了美国第三大最受欢迎的网络浏览器Firefox。Mozilla致力于保护Firefox用户和互联网用户的隐私。通过长期的、第一人称的观察，该项目将探索Mozilla通过将隐私设计直接“融入”其网页浏览软件的功能和属性来尊重这一原则的努力。Mozilla自认为是全行业致力于加强互联网隐私保护的领导者，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意义和社会意义的评估，从而促进及时干预正在进行的关于隐私、个人信息、技术和监控的公共政策辩论。

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.