With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Utilizing Privacy Technology for the Greater Bad

TL;DR

This paper examines the dual-use nature of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), highlighting how their development can inadvertently facilitate cybercrime, and emphasizes the importance of considering social and criminal motivations in security research.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of recent PETs, discussing their potential misuse in criminal activities and advocating for integrating social science perspectives into security research.

Findings

14 new or utilized PETs identified in recent literature

Some PETs have widespread use cases including criminal activities

Development of PETs may contribute to increased cybercrime risk

Abstract

As people across the world become increasingly aware of how their privacy is compromised in this digital era, the field of Privacy Enhancing Technologies, or PETs, has boomed. The first workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technology was in 2000, then called the "Workshop on Design Issues in Anonymity and Unobservability." By 2007, the workshop had ballooned into a full symposium. In 2015, the first issue of the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies journal was published. This year in 2019, there were 4 volumes of Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies published, containing a total of 66 papers. Of these papers, we identified 14 which specifically describe PETs that have been newly developed or utilized in a new way. We focused on 3 papers that seemed to have widespread use cases. Some of these use cases, however, include criminal activity. While heavily focused on adversarial actions and capability, much of security research does not focus on or consider the social science and motivations behind bad actors. We believe that this is a critical factor to consider when working on the problem of cybercrime. In this paper, we will analyze some of the cutting edge PETs and the potential risks associated with them from the lenses of computer science and criminal justice. We argue that the continued development of privacy enhancing technology contributes to the global rise of cybercrime.