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Privacy and Social Movements

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Internet Science (INSCI 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11551))

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Abstract

Privacy is an often controversial, misunderstood, and underestimated concept, including on purpose by actors like governments or the Silicon Valley giants of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA). Unfortunately, due to today’s technologies, the potential for intrusions into personal privacy have increased exponentially. Even though there are different laws that protect privacy (i.e. GDPR) what is considered to be private by individuals and what is legally protected as private can differ. Different apps have different privacy policies, which leads to the protection of usually limited types of information, but not others. This situation is dangerous for social movements. Hackers and academics have been developing tools like Tor and Signal to encrypt our messages, and protect the right to privacy and anonymity. However, so much more needs to be done, both from a technical perspective, and through advocacy. Individuals, NGOs, activists: Everyone is a potential target of surveillance. In this paper we discuss the impact of privacy violations on social movements and the tools for encrypted messaging currently used by social movements. We show that the misunderstandings around privacy by users and the causes that prevent the developing of better tools for social movements.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files.

  2. 2.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-40276568.

  3. 3.

    https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/problem-mobile-phones.

  4. 4.

    https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/.

  5. 5.

    https://www.wired.com/2016/12/encryption-app-signal-fights-censorship-clever-workaround/.

  6. 6.

    http://www.passwordresearch.com/stats/statistic409.html.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Moxie Marlinspike for clarifying the situation with regards to Wire and phone number collection. The author is funded in part by the European Commission H2020 NEXTLEAP Project (Grant No. 6882).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Inria, 2 rue Simone Iff, 75012, Paris, France

    Iness Ben Guirat

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  1. Iness Ben Guirat
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Correspondence to Iness Ben Guirat .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Svetlana S. Bodrunova

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway

    Asbjørn Følstad

  4. Inria, Le Chesnay, France

    Harry Halpin

  5. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Polina Kolozaridi

  6. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Leonid Yuldashev

  7. St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Anna Smoliarova

  8. TU München, Munich, Germany

    Heiko Niedermayer

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Ben Guirat, I. (2019). Privacy and Social Movements. In: Bodrunova, S., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17704-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17705-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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