CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
-
People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to…
-
What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?
Machine learning is eating the world. The abundance of training data has helped ML achieve amazing results for object recognition, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and all manner of other…
-
Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we…
-
Demystifying The Dark Web: Peeling Back the Layers of Tor’s Onion Services
by Philipp Winter, Annie Edmundson, Laura Roberts, Agnieskza Dutkowska-Żuk, Marshini Chetty, and Nick Feamster Want to find US military drone data leaks online? Frolick in a fraudster’s paradise for people’s…
-
Internet of Things in Context: Discovering Privacy Norms with Scalable Surveys
by Noah Apthorpe, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Arunesh Mathur, Nick Feamster Privacy concerns surrounding disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Things (and, in particular, connected smart home devices) have been prevalent in…
-
Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten…
-
Against privacy defeatism: why browsers can still stop fingerprinting
In this post I’ll discuss how a landmark piece of privacy research was widely misinterpreted, how this misinterpretation deterred the development of privacy technologies rather than spurring it, how a…
-
Fast Web-based Attacks to Discover and Control IoT Devices
By Gunes Acar, Danny Y. Huang, Frank Li, Arvind Narayanan, and Nick Feamster Two web-based attacks against IoT devices made the rounds this week. Researchers Craig Young and Brannon Dorsey…
-
Exfiltrating data from the browser using battery discharge information
Modern batteries are powerful – indeed they are smart, and have a privileged position enabling them to sense device utilization patterns. A recent research paper has identified a potential threat: researchers…
-
Princeton Dialogues of AI and Ethics: Launching case studies
Summary: We are releasing four case studies on AI and ethics, as part of the Princeton Dialogues on AI and Ethics. The impacts of rapid developments in artificial intelligence (“AI”)…