Category: Privacy & Security
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Four cents to deanonymize: Companies reverse hashed email addresses
[This is a joint post by Gunes Acar, Steve Englehardt, and me. I’m happy to announce that Steve has recently joined Mozilla as a privacy engineer while he wraps up his Ph.D. at Princeton. He coauthored this post in his Princeton capacity, and this post doesn’t necessarily represent Mozilla’s views. — Arvind Narayanan.] Your email…
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Judge Declares Some PACER Fees Illegal but Does Not Go Far Enough
Five years ago, in a post called “Making Excuses for Fees on Electronic Public Records,” I described my attempts to persuade the federal Judiciary to stop charging for access to their web-based system, PACER (“Public Access to Court Electronic Records”). Nearly every search, page view, and PDF download from the system incurs a fee ranging…
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When The Choice Is To Delete Facebook Or Buy A Loaf Of Bread
By Julieanne Romanosky and Marshini Chetty In the last week, there has been a growing debate around Facebook and privacy. On Twitter, the newly formed #deletefacebook movement calls for users who are upset over the data breach of over 50 million Facebook accounts by Cambridge Analytica to rid themselves of the platform altogether. But like…
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Is affiliate marketing disclosed to consumers on social media?
By Arunesh Mathur, Arvind Narayanan and Marshini Chetty YouTube has millions of videos similar in spirit to this one: The video reviews Blue Apron—an online grocery service—describing how it is efficient and cheaper than buying groceries at the store. The description of the video has a link to Blue Apron which gets you a $30…
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What’s new with BlockSci, Princeton’s blockchain analysis tool
Six months ago we released the initial version of BlockSci, a fast and expressive tool to analyze public blockchains. In the accompanying paper we explained how we used it to answer scientific questions about security, privacy, miner behavior, and economics using blockchain data. BlockSci has a number of other applications including forensics and as an…
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No boundaries for credentials: New password leaks to Mixpanel and Session Replay Companies
In this installment of the “No Boundaries” series we show how wholesale collection of user interactions by third-party analytics and session replay scripts cause inadvertent collection of passwords. By Steve Englehardt, Gunes Acar and Arvind Narayanan Following the recent report that Mixpanel, a popular analytics provider, had been inadvertently collecting passwords that users typed into…
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Blockchain: What is it good for?
Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are surrounded by world-historic levels of hype and snake oil. For people like me who take the old-fashioned view that technical claims should be backed by sound arguments and evidence, it’s easy to fall into the trap of concluding that there is no there there–and that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are fundamentally useless.…
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How Tech is Failing Victims of Intimate Partner Violence: Thomas Ristenpart at CITP
What technology risks are faced by people who experience intimate partner violence? How is the security community failing them, and what questions might we need to ask to make progress on social and technical interventions? Speaking Tuesday at CITP was Thomas Ristenpart (@TomRistenpart), an associate professor at Cornell Tech and a member of the Department…
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(Mis)conceptions About the Impact of Surveillance
Does surveillance impact behavior? Or is its effect, if real, only temporary or trivial? Government surveillance is back in the news thanks to the so-called “Nunes memo”, making this is a perfect time to examine new research on the impact of surveillance. This includes my own recent work, as my doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute,…
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Making Sense of Child Protection Predictive Models: Tech-Soc Reading Group Feb 20
How are predictive models transforming how we think about child protection, and how should we think about the role of such systems in a democracy? If you’re interested to ask these questions, join us at 2-3pm on Tuesday, Feb 20th at Sherrerd Hall room 306 for our opening Technology and Society Reading group meeting. The conversation…