Month: September 2017
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I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking
In this post I discuss a new paper that will appear at PETS 2018, authored by myself, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan. What happens when you open an email and allow it to display embedded images and pixels? You may expect the sender to learn that you’ve read the email, and which device you used…
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What our students found when they tried to break their bubbles
This is the second part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, where we focus on the results. You can read more about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project here. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik This past spring, we taught an…
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Breaking your bubble
This is the first part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, we talk about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project. To read more about the results of the project, go to Part Two. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik The 2016…
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SESTA May Encourage the Adoption of Broken Automated Filtering Technologies
The Senate is currently considering the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693), with a scheduled hearing tomorrow. In brief, the proposed legislation threatens to roll back aspects of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which relieve content providers, or so-called “intermediaries” (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter) of liability for the content that is hosted on their…
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Getting serious about research ethics: AI and machine learning
[This blog post is a continuation of our series about research ethics in computer science.] The widespread deployment of artificial intelligence and specifically machine learning algorithms causes concern for some fundamental values in society, such as employment, privacy, and discrimination. While these algorithms promise to optimize social and economic processes, research in this area has…
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Blockchains and voting
I’ve been asked about a number of ideas lately involving voting systems and blockchains. This blog piece talks about all the security properties that a voting system needs to have, where blockchains help, and where they don’t. Let’s start off a decade ago, when Daniel Sandler and I first wrote a paper saying blockchains would be…
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BlockSci: a platform for blockchain science and exploration
The Bitcoin blockchain — currently 140GB and growing — contains a massive amount of data that can give us insights into the Bitcoin ecosystem, including how users, businesses, and miners operate. Today we’re announcing BlockSci, an open-source software tool that enables fast and expressive analysis of Bitcoin’s and many other blockchains, and an accompanying working…