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.
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As you browse the internet, online advertisers track nearly every site you visit, amassing a trove of information on your habits and preferences. When you visit a news site, they…
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Which voting machines can be hacked through the Internet?
Over 9000 jurisdictions (counties and states) in the U.S. run elections with a variety of voting machines: optical scanners for paper ballots, and direct-recording “touchscreen” machines. Which ones of them…
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Bitcoin’s history deserves to be better preserved
Much of Bitcoin’s development has happened in the open in a transparent manner through the mailing list and the bitcoin-dev IRC channel. The third-party website BitcoinStats maintains logs of the…
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All the News That’s Fit to Change: Insights into a corpus of 2.5 million news headlines
[Thanks to Joel Reidenberg for encouraging this deeper dive into news headlines!] There is no guarantee that a news headline you see online today will not change tomorrow, or even…
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Improving Bitcoin’s Privacy and Scalability with TumbleBit
Last week we unveiled TumbleBit, a new anonymous payments scheme that addresses two major technical challenges faced by Bitcoin today: (1) scaling Bitcoin to meet increasing use, and (2) protecting…
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Routing Detours: Can We Avoid Nation-State Surveillance?
Since 2013, Brazil has taken significant steps to build out their networking infrastructure to thwart nation-state mass surveillance. For example, the country is deploying a 3,500-mile fiber cable from Fortaleza,…
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Differential Privacy is Vulnerable to Correlated Data — Introducing Dependent Differential Privacy
[This post is joint work with Princeton graduate student Changchang Liu and IBM researcher Supriyo Chakraborty. See our paper for full details. — Prateek Mittal ] The tussle between data…
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Language necessarily contains human biases, and so will machines trained on language corpora
I have a new draft paper with Aylin Caliskan-Islam and Joanna Bryson titled Semantics derived automatically from language corpora necessarily contain human biases. We show empirically that natural language necessarily contains…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 2: Cyberoffense is not the best cyberdefense!
State and county election officials across the country employ thousands of computers in election administration, most of them are connected (from time to time) to the internet (or exchange data…
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Security against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence
There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical…