Category: Privacy & Security
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How the Contextual Integrity Framework Helps Explain Children’s Understanding of Privacy and Security Online
This post discusses a new paper that will be presented at the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). I wrote this paper with co-authors Shalmali Naik, Utkarsha Devkar, Marshini Chetty, Tammy Clegg, and Jessica Vitak. Watching YouTube during breakfast. Playing Animal Jam after school. Asking Google about snakes. Checking…
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No boundaries: Exfiltration of personal data by session-replay scripts
This is the first post in our “No Boundaries” series, in which we reveal how third-party scripts on websites have been extracting personal information in increasingly intrusive ways. [0] by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan Update: we’ve released our data — the list of sites with session-replay scripts, and the sites where we’ve…
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HOWTO: Protect your small organization against electronic adversaries
October is “cyber security awareness month“. Among other notable announcements, Google just rolled out “advanced protection” — free for any Google account. So, in the spirit of offering pragmatic advice to real users, I wrote a short document that’s meant not for the usual Tinker audience but rather for the sort of person running a…
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The Second Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection
Arvind Narayanan and I are excited to announce that the Workshop on Technology and Consumer Protection (ConPro ’18) will return in May 2018, once again co-located with the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The first ConPro brought together researchers from a wide range of disciplines, united by a shared goal of promoting consumer welfare…
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Avoid an Equifax-like breach? Help us understand how system administrators patch machines
The recent Equifax breach that leaked around 140 million Americans’ personal information was boiled down to a system patch that was never applied, even after the company was alerted to the vulnerability in March 2017. Our work studying how users manage software updates on desktops and mobile tells a story that keeping machines patched is…
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I never signed up for this! Privacy implications of email tracking
In this post I discuss a new paper that will appear at PETS 2018, authored by myself, Jeffrey Han, and Arvind Narayanan. What happens when you open an email and allow it to display embedded images and pixels? You may expect the sender to learn that you’ve read the email, and which device you used…
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What our students found when they tried to break their bubbles
This is the second part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, where we focus on the results. You can read more about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project here. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik This past spring, we taught an…
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Breaking your bubble
This is the first part of a two-part series about a class project on online filter bubbles. In this post, we talk about our pedagogical approach and how we carried out the project. To read more about the results of the project, go to Part Two. By Janet Xu and Matthew J. Salganik The 2016…
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SESTA May Encourage the Adoption of Broken Automated Filtering Technologies
The Senate is currently considering the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA, S. 1693), with a scheduled hearing tomorrow. In brief, the proposed legislation threatens to roll back aspects of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which relieve content providers, or so-called “intermediaries” (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter) of liability for the content that is hosted on their…
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Blockchains and voting
I’ve been asked about a number of ideas lately involving voting systems and blockchains. This blog piece talks about all the security properties that a voting system needs to have, where blockchains help, and where they don’t. Let’s start off a decade ago, when Daniel Sandler and I first wrote a paper saying blockchains would be…