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