CITP Blog - Formerly Freedom to Tinker

Tag: online tracking

  • (Mis)conceptions About the Impact of Surveillance

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    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,…

  • When the cookie meets the blockchain

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    Cryptocurrencies are portrayed as a more anonymous and less traceable method of payment than credit cards. So if you shop online and pay with Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, how much privacy do you have? In a new paper, we show just how little. Websites including shopping sites typically have dozens of third-party trackers per site.…

  • AdNauseam, Google, and the Myth of the “Acceptable Ad”

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    Earlier this month, we (Helen Nissenbaum, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and I), released a new and improved AdNauseam 3.0. For those not familiar, AdNauseam is the adblocker that clicks every ad in an effort to obfuscate tracking profiles and inject doubt into the lucrative economic system that drives advertising-based surveillance. The 3.0 release contains some new features we’ve been excited to…

  • Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting

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    It seems like every month we hear of some new online privacy violation in the news, on topics such as fingerprinting or web tracking. Many of these news stories highlight academic research. What we don’t see is whether these studies and the subsequent news stories have any impact on privacy. Our 2014 canvas fingerprinting measurement…

  • How cookies can be used for global surveillance

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    Today we present an updated version of our paper [0] examining how the ubiquitous use of online tracking cookies can allow an adversary conducting network surveillance to target a user or surveil users en masse.  In the initial version of the study, summarized below, we examined the technical feasibility of the attack. Now we’ve made the…

  • The hidden perils of cookie syncing

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    [Steven Englehardt is a first-year Ph.D. student in the computer security group at Princeton. In this post he talks about the implications of a recent study that we published in collaboration with researchers at KU Leuven, Belgium. — Arvind Narayanan] Online tracking is becoming more sophisticated and thus increasingly difficult to block. Modern browsers expose many surfaces that enable users…

  • Web measurement for fairness and transparency

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    [This is the first in a series of posts giving some examples of security-related research in the Princeton computer science department. We’re actively recruiting top-notch students to enter our Ph.D. program, as well as postdocs and visiting scholars. We don’t have enough bandwidth here on the blog to feature everything we do, so we’ll be…