April 25, 2024

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

The Princeton Web Census: a 1-million-site measurement and analysis of web privacy

Web privacy measurement — observing websites and services to detect, characterize, and quantify privacy impacting behaviors — has repeatedly forced companies to improve their privacy practices due to public pressure, press coverage, and regulatory action. In previous blog posts I’ve analyzed why our 2014 collaboration with KU Leuven researchers studying canvas fingerprinting was successful, and […]

Is Tesla Motors a Hidden Warrior for Consumer Digital Privacy?

Amid the privacy intrusions of modern digital life, few are as ubiquitous and alarming as those perpetrated by marketers. The economics of the entire industry are built on tools that exist in shadowy corners of the Internet and lurk about while we engage with information, products and even friends online, harvesting our data everywhere our […]