Category: Privacy & Security
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Regulatory Questions Abound as Mobile Payments Clamor for Position in Apps
People frequently associate mobile payments with “tap and pay” — walking into a store, flashing your smartphone, and then walking out with stuff. But in-store sales really aren’t the focus of companies working on mobile payment issues. That’s because payment in stores generally isn’t a problem in need of a fix. Swiping a payment card…
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Concerned about Internet of Things Security?
There is no shortage of warnings about the need to improve security for the Internet of Things: The Guardian asks “Can we secure the internet of things in time to prevent another cyber-attack?”. The New York Times calls for “Stepping up Security for an Internet of Things world”. Technology Review reports that Security Experts Warn…
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AdNauseam, Google, and the Myth of the “Acceptable Ad”
Earlier this month, we (Helen Nissenbaum, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and I), released a new and improved AdNauseam 3.0. For those not familiar, AdNauseam is the adblocker that clicks every ad in an effort to obfuscate tracking profiles and inject doubt into the lucrative economic system that drives advertising-based surveillance. The 3.0 release contains some new features we’ve been excited to…
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NYC to Collect GPS Data on Car Service Passengers—Good Intentions Gone Awry or Something Else?
During the holiday season, New York City through its Taxi & Limousine Commission (the “TLC”) proposed a new rule expanding data reporting obligations for car service platform companies including Uber and Lyft. If the rule is adopted, car services will now have to report the GPS coordinates of both passenger pick-up and drop-off locations to the…
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Disrupting The Business Model of the Fake News Industry
By Katherine Haenschen & Paul Ellenbogen In the aftermath of the 2016 election, researchers and media professionals alike seized on the vast proliferation of so-called “Fake News” on Facebook as a cause for concern. An informed citizenry is a necessary condition for democracy, so it is far from ideal to have millions of people consuming…
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New Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection
[Joe Calandrino is a veteran of Freedom to Tinker and CITP. As long time readers will remember, he did his Ph.D. here, advised by Ed Felten. He recently joined the FTC as research director of OTech, the Office of Technology Research and Investigation. Today we have an exciting announcement. — Arvind Narayanan.] Arvind Narayanan and…
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Privacy: A Personality, Not Property, Right
The European Court of Justice’s decision in Google v. Costeja González appears to compel search engines to remove links to certain impugned search results at the request of individual Europeans (and potentially others beyond Europe’s borders). What is more, Costeja may inadvertently and ironically have the effect of appointing American companies as private censors and…
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The Effects of the Forthcoming FCC Privacy Rules on Internet Security
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced new privacy rules that govern how Internet service providers can share information about consumers with third parties. One focus of this rulemaking has been on the use and sharing of so-called “Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)”—information about subscribers—for advertising. The Center for Information Technology Policy and the Center…
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Learning Privacy Expectations by Crowdsourcing Contextual Informational Norms
[This post reports on joint work with Schrasing Tong, Thomas Wies (NYU), Paula Kift (NYU), Helen Nissenbaum (NYU), Lakshminarayanan Subramanian (NYU), Prateek Mittal (Princeton) — Yan] To appear in the proceedings of the Fourth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2016) We would like to thank Joanna Huey for helpful comments and feedback. Motivation…
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Sign up now for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency
I’m excited to announce that registration for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency is now open. The workshop will take place at NYU on Nov 19. It convenes an emerging interdisciplinary community that seeks transparency and oversight of data-driven algorithmic systems through empirical research. Despite the short notice of the workshop’s announcement (about…