Category: Privacy & Security
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"You Might Also Like:" Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering
Ann Kilzer, Arvind Narayanan, Ed Felten, Vitaly Shmatikov, and I have released a new research paper detailing the privacy risks posed by collaborative filtering recommender systems. To examine the risk, we use public data available from Hunch, LibraryThing, Last.fm, and Amazon in addition to evaluating a synthetic system using data from the Netflix Prize dataset.…
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Web Tracking and User Privacy Workshop: Test Cases for Privacy on the Web
This guest post is from Nick Doty, of the W3C and UC Berkeley School of Information. As a companion post to my summary of the position papers submitted for last month’s W3C Do-Not-Track Workshop, hosted by CITP, Nick goes deeper into the substance and interaction during the workshop. The level of interest and participation in…
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Overstock's $1M Challenge
As reported in Fast Company, RichRelevance and Overstock.com teamed up to offer up to a $1,000,000 prize for improving “its recommendation engine by 10 percent or more.” If You Liked Netflix, You Might Also Like Overstock When I first read a summary of this contest, it appeared they were following in Netflix’s footsteps right down…
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In DHS Takedown Frenzy, Mozilla Refuses to Delete MafiaaFire Add-On
Not satisfied with seizing domain names, the Department of Homeland Security asked Mozilla to take down the MafiaaFire add-on for Firefox. Mozilla, through its legal counsel Harvey Anderson, refused. Mozilla deserves thanks and credit for a principled stand for its users’ rights. MafiaaFire is a quick plugin, as its author describes, providing redirection service for…
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Tracking Your Every Move: iPhone Retains Extensive Location History
Today, Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan revealed that Apple’s iPhone maintains an apparently indefinite log of its location history. To show the data available, they produced and demoed an application called iPhone Tracker for plotting these locations on a map. The application allows you to replay your movements, displaying your precise location at any point…
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What We Lose if We Lose Data.gov
In its latest 2011 budget proposal, Congress makes deep cuts to the Electronic Government Fund. This fund supports the continued development and upkeep of several key open government websites, including Data.gov, USASpending.gov and the IT Dashboard. An earlier proposal would have cut the funding from $34 million to $2 million this year, although the current…
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The Next Step towards an Open Internet
Now that the FCC has finally acted to safeguard network neutrality, the time has come to take the next step toward creating a level playing field on the rest of the Information Superhighway. Network neutrality rules are designed to ensure that large telecommunications companies do not squelch free speech and online innovation. However, it is…
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The case of Prof. Cronon and the FOIA requests for his private emails
Prof. William Cronon, from the University of Wisconsin, started a blog, Scholar as Citizen, wherein he critiqued Republican policies in the State of Wisconsin and elsewhere. I’m going to skip the politics and focus on the fact that the Republicans used Wisconsin’s FOIA mechanism to ask for a wide variety of his emails and they’re…
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Web Browsers and Comodo Disclose A Successful Certificate Authority Attack, Perhaps From Iran
Today, the public learned of a previously undisclosed compromise of a trusted Certificate Authority — one of the entities that issues certificates attesting to the identity of “secure” web sites. Last week, Comodo quietly issued a command via its certificate revocation servers designed to tell browsers to no longer accept 9 certificates. This is fairly…
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Seals on NJ voting machines, March 2009
During the NJ voting-machines trial, both Roger Johnston and I showed different ways of removing all the seals from voting machines and putting them back without evidence of tampering. The significance of this is that one can then install fraudulent vote-stealing software in the computer. The State responded by switching seals yet again, right in…