When you browse about oN-LINE AD NETWORKS and search engines love it. Everything you do– every query you type, every page you load –helps them develop a profile of you, the better to sell advertising targeting your interests. Spy bureaus are likely also pleased to track your online moves.

AdNauseam, one, clicks every advertisement on each page I see, baffling ad networks.

This is “obfuscation,” and it is a fascinating development in our connection to internet surveillance.

Working with programmers abroad, Nissenbaum has spent the previous decade crafting programs like TrackMeNot and AdNauseam, and she released a novel on obfuscation is a strategy for modern life this autumn.

Reason one: It is increasingly difficult to “opt out” of on-line tracking. Online services promise they are not involuntary, but the price of being a true refusenik grows.

It is a means for individuals in a comparatively poor position–which would be to say all of us, compared with Facebook or Google . You use your opponents’ built-in weakness: their insatiable hunger for data.

Obfuscation has a lengthy pedigree. Chaff dropped to confuse enemy radar. WikiLeaks has been understood to create fake traffic for leakers that are uploading files to the website as cover. In all scenarios, the best technique for obfuscation, says Vincent Toubiana, a programmer of TrackMeNot, “is to create sound.”

As you may imagine, the people in power are ecstatic by this monkeywrenching. Obfuscation, they say, is a sort of unjust “free riding.” So TrackMeNot users get those benefits without giving their personal data — search engines use tracking to enhance the total quality of results. Finn Brunton, Nissenbaum and her coauthor, believe obfuscators are in the clear provided that their tools are open to everyone and they do not make other users off.

A larger issue with obfuscation is the fact that it does not curtail on-line tracking. Only laws could do that, and it is not quite likely to come about. Nor is obfuscation, as security that is accurate hastens to point out,. You want unbreakable encryption to truly conceal from, say, a repressive authorities.