Privacy Worlds: Exploring Values and Design in the Development of the Tor Anonymity Network

Ben Collier,James Stewart

doi:10.1177/01622439211039019

Abstract

This paper explores, through empirical research, how values, engineering practices, and technological design decisions shape one another in the development of privacy technologies. We propose the concept of “privacy worlds” to explore the values and design practices of the engineers of one of the world’s most notable (and contentious) privacy technologies: the Tor network. By following Tor’s design and development we show a privacy world emerging—one centered on a construction of privacy understood through the topology of structural power in the Internet backbone. This central “cipher” discourse renders privacy as a problem that can be “solved” through engineering, allowing the translation and representation of different groups of imagined users, adversaries, and technical aspects of the Internet in the language of the system. It also stabilizes a “flattened,” neutralized conception of privacy, risking stripping it of its political and cultural depth. We argue for an enriched empirical focus on design practices in privacy technologies, both as sites where values and material power are shaped, and as a place where the various worlds that will go on to cluster around them—of users, maintainers, and others—are imagined and reconciled.

Highlights

The history of the Internet is one of bitter struggles over values, imagined future societies, and how these become realized in infrastructure
Tor has its roots in the fusion of two precursor privacy worlds—of the cypherpunks and the military developers—around a technological design whose principles aligned at the overlaps between these two distinct visions of the future Internet
Tor’s developers saw the Internet as a democratizing force and global good—a space of liberation—and potentially a catastrophic source of authoritarian control. They intrinsically understood that the real power is in the infrastructure; this infrastructural thinking is often at the heart of privacy technology and tends to reflect, as Tor does, a universalist approach to privacy

Summary

Introduction

The history of the Internet is one of bitter struggles over values, imagined future societies, and how these become realized in infrastructure. Social worlds theory provides a framework for how these often very different ideas, values, and practices come together in communal action to make something in the real world—a social fact that they produce together (such as a functioning museum, an art exhibition, a successful surgical operation, or online privacy) (Becker 1976; Unruh 1980) This is powerful for conducting empirical research studies of these infrastructures and how these distinct and internally self-consistent “worlds” intersect around them (Clarke and Star 2008). We show the world of the developers as it comes together across the design process; as developers wrestle with political and social issues and try to realize privacy through engineering practices

Method

Discussion