Category: Privacy & Security
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Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and how it was used. It’s tempting to conclude that because Facebook didn’t change their data collection procedures, the experiment couldn’t possibly have affected users’ privacy…
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On Decentralizing Prediction Markets and Order Books
In a new paper to be presented next week at WEIS by Jeremy Clark, we discuss the challenges in designing truly decentralized prediction markets and order books. Prediction markets allow market participants to trade shares in future events (such as “Will the USA advance to the knockout stage of the 2014 World Cup?”) and turn…
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Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions
[Nicky Robinson is an undergraduate whose Junior Independent Work project, advised by Joseph Bonneau, turned into a neat research paper. — Arvind Narayanan] When you use the Facebook Connect [1] login system, another website may ask for permission to “post to Facebook for you.” But what does this message mean? If you click “Okay”, what…
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Bitcoin Mining Now Dominated by One Pool
The big news in the Bitcoin world, is that one entity, called GHash, seems to be in control of more than half of all of the mining power. A part of Bitcoin’s appeal has been its distributed nature: the idea that no one party is in control but the system operates through the cooperative action…
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Encryption as protest
As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used to. In computer science, PETs are used for protecting anonymity or confidentiality, often via application of cryptography, and are intended to be bullet-proof against an…
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Why King George III Can Encrypt
[This is a guest post by Wenley Tong, Sebastian Gold, Samuel Gichohi, Mihai Roman, and Jonathan Frankle, undergraduates in the Privacy Technologies seminar that I offered for the second time in Spring 2014. They did an excellent class project on the usability of email encryption.] PGP and similar email encryption standards have existed since the early…
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Wickr: Putting the “non” in anonymity
[Let’s welcome new CITP blogger Pete Zimmerman, a first-year graduate student in the computer security group at Princeton. — Arvind Narayanan] Following the revelations of wide-scale surveillance by US intelligence agencies and their allies, a myriad of services offering end-to-end encrypted communications have cropped up to take advantage of the increasing demand for privacy from surveillance.…
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Increasing Civic Engagement Requires Understanding Why People Have Chosen Not to Participate
Last month, I was a poll watcher for the mayoral primary in Washington, DC. My duties were to monitor several polling places to confirm that each Precinct Captain was ensuring that the City’s election laws were being followed on site; in particular, that everyone who believed that they were qualified to vote was able to…
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Threshold signatures and Bitcoin wallet security: A menu of options
Before Bitcoin can mature as a currency, the security of wallets must be improved. Previously, I motivated the need for sharing Bitcoin wallets using threshold signatures as a means to greatly increase their resilience to theft. For corporate users, threshold signatures enable cryptographically secure access control. For individuals, threshold signatures can be used to build…
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Google Spain and the “Right to Be Forgotten”
The European Court of Justice (CJEU) has decided the Google Spain case, which involves the “right to be forgotten” on the Internet. The case was brought by Mario Costeja González, a lawyer who, back in 1998, had unpaid debts that resulted in the attachment and public auction of his real estate. Notices of the auctions,…