Developing Privacy Extensions: Is it Advocacy through the Web Browser?

Abstract

In 2015, Edward Snowden recommended that ordinary citizens use adblocking software and an encryption-oriented privacy extension for their web browser to protect against surveillance. This paper critically explores how the development of privacy extension software for web browsers can be situated in relation to privacy advocacy. Privacy advocates are individuals who act on behalf of the citizenry to speak to governments and corporations about how our data are collected and processed. While the Snowden revelations began in 2013 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, privacy extensions remain underexplored in the literature on privacy advocacy. This paper shares findings from ethnographically informed interviews conducted with thirty developers and other knowledgeable experts who created twenty-six named privacy extensions. The privacy extensions explored included anti-tracking, hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), and privacy policy and password-related functionalities. Although privacy extensions are an imperfect set of tools to protect privacy, we argue that production of this software demonstrates an array of privacy advocacy strategies. Privacy extensions can be scaffolded upon previous resistance moves to surveillance by individuals, while also sometimes intersecting with traditional and expanded notions of collective action in the digital age.