Obscurity Settings

About this Episode

What kind of privacy do we want to have? What makes others’ knowledge about us turn from everyday acceptable to weird and creepy? Woody Hartzog talks with us about the difficulties of maintaining privacy, whatever it should be, online and in social networks. We’re used to the cheap obscurity and fleetingness of our physical lives, but it’s cheap and tempting to know more about others online than they’d like. Can we design platforms to deliver the individual obscurity we’ve enjoyed in the past? Conversation ranges between celebrities and privacy, searchability, giving up on hiding that we’re all gross and weird, our many identities, the problem of dumb teenagers, protected Twitter accounts, internet bad guys, and naked, dancing Buddhist monks.

This show’s links:

• Woody Hartzog’s faculty profile and writing
• Philosophy Bites, Shaun Nichols on Death and the Self
• Woodrow Hartzog, Chain-Link Confidentiality
• Joshua Fairfield, BitProperty
• About security through obscurity
• Woodrow Hartzog and Frederic Stutzman, Obscurity by Design
• Daniel Solve, A Taxonomy of Privacy
• David Brin, The Transparent Society
• Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
• About the narcissism of small differences
• Richard Posner, The Right of Privacy
• Neil Richards, Intellectual Privacy (the article) and Intellectual Privacy (the book)
• Library of Congress, Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress
• Twitter, About Public and Protected Tweets; see also Greg Kumparak, Twitter Bug Allowed Some Protected Accounts to Be Read by Unapproved Followers
• About Yik Yak
• Mike Isaac, A Look Behind the Snapchat Photo Leak Claims
• In the Matter of Red Zone Investment Group, Inc., an FTC case involving, among other things, a fake windows registration window
• Woodrow Hartzog, Website Design as Contract
• About the Whisper app
• About the Sears Holdings Management Corp. case before the FTC