Six months ago we released the initial version of BlockSci, a fast and expressive tool to analyze public blockchains. In the accompanying paper we explained how we used it to answer scientific questions about security, privacy, miner behavior, and economics using blockchain data. BlockSci has a number of other applications including forensics and as an […]
Website operators are in the dark about privacy violations by third-party scripts
January 12, 2018 by
by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan. Recently we revealed that “session replay” scripts on websites record everything you do, like someone looking over your shoulder, and send it to third-party servers. This en-masse data exfiltration inevitably scoops up sensitive, personal information — in real time, as you type it. We released the data […]
Web Census Notebook: A new tool for studying web privacy
June 9, 2017 by
As part of the Web Transparency and Accountability Project, we’ve been visiting the web’s top 1 million sites every month using our open-source privacy measurement tool OpenWPM. This has led to numerous worrying findings such as the systematic abuse of newly introduced web features for fingerprinting, leading to better privacy tools and occasionally strong responses […]
The future of ad blocking
April 14, 2017 by
There’s an ongoing arms race between ad blockers and websites — more and more sites either try to sneak their ads through or force users to disable ad blockers. Most previous discussions have assumed that this is a cat-and-mouse game that will escalate indefinitely. But in a new paper, accompanied by proof-of-concept code, we challenge […]
Sign up now for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency
October 28, 2016 by
I’m excited to announce that registration for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency is now open. The workshop will take place at NYU on Nov 19. It convenes an emerging interdisciplinary community that seeks transparency and oversight of data-driven algorithmic systems through empirical research. Despite the short notice of the workshop’s announcement (about […]
