Category: Privacy & Security
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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…
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The AT&T Deal Is About the Data
Most of the mainstream media coverage of the proposed AT&T acquisition of Time Warner has missed an important risk. Much of the discussion has focused on the potential market power the combined entity would have to raise prices, limit choice or otherwise disadvantage consumers. A primary motivation for the deal, however, as readers of Freedom…
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Bitcoin is unstable without the block reward
With Miles Carlsten, Harry Kalodner, and Matt Weinberg, I have a new paper titled On the instability of Bitcoin without the block reward, which Harry will present at ACM CCS next week. The paper predicts that miner incentives will start to go haywire as Bitcoin rewards shift from block rewards to transaction fees, based on…
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The Effect of DNS on Tor’s Anonymity
This blog post is joint work with Benjamin Greschbach, Tobias Pulls, Laura M. Roberts, and Nick Feamster. Counting almost two million daily users and 7,000 relays, the Tor network is the largest anonymity network operating today. The Tor Project is maintaining a privacy-enhanced version of the popular Firefox web browser—Tor Browser—that bounces its network traffic…
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Are you really anonymous online?
As you browse the internet, online advertisers track nearly every site you visit, amassing a trove of information on your habits and preferences. When you visit a news site, they might see you’re a fan of basketball, opera and mystery novels, and accordingly select ads tailored to your tastes. Advertisers use this information to create…
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Bitcoin’s history deserves to be better preserved
Much of Bitcoin’s development has happened in the open in a transparent manner through the mailing list and the bitcoin-dev IRC channel. The third-party website BitcoinStats maintains logs of the bitcoin-dev IRC chats. [1] This resource has proved useful is linked to by other sources such as the Bitcoin wiki. When reading a blog post…
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Improving Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scalability with TumbleBit
Last week we unveiled TumbleBit, a new anonymous payments scheme that addresses two major technical challenges faced by Bitcoin today: (1) scaling Bitcoin to meet increasing use, and (2) protecting the privacy of payments made via Bitcoin. Our proof-of-concept source code and a pre-print of the latest version of our paper were both posted online…