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 tasks. Much of this training data is very sensitive, including personal photos, search queries, location traces, and health-care records. In a recent series of papers, […]
Archives for 2018
Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
July 16, 2018 by
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 need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching […]
Demystifying The Dark Web: Peeling Back the Layers of Tor’s Onion Services
July 12, 2018 by
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 personal information? Or crawl through the criminal underbelly of the Internet? These are the images that come to most when they think of the dark […]
Internet of Things in Context: Discovering Privacy Norms with Scalable Surveys
July 10, 2018 by
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 public discourse, with privacy violations from these devices occurring frequently. As these new technologies challenge existing societal norms, determining the bounds of “acceptable” information handling […]
Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
July 3, 2018 by
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 mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with […]
