October 5, 2024

Can ChatGPT—and its successors—go from cool to tool?

Anyone reading Freedom to Tinker has seen examples of ChatGPT doing cool things.  One of my favorites is its amazing answer to this prompt: “write a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”   Based in part on this kind of […]

The CheapBit of Fitness Trackers Apps

Yan Shvartzshnaider (@ynotez) and Madelyn Sanfilippo (@MrsMRS_PhD) Fitness trackers are “[devices] that you can wear that records your daily physical activity, as well as other information about your health, such as your heart rate” [Oxford Dictionary]. The increasing popularity of wearable devices offered by Apple, Google, Nike inadvertently led cheaper versions to flood the market, […]

Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices

By Hooman Mohajeri Moghaddam, Gunes Acar, Ben Burgess, Arunesh Mathur, Danny Y. Huang, Nick Feamster, Ed Felten, Prateek Mittal, and Arvind Narayanan By 2020 one third of US households are estimated to “cut the cord”, i.e., discontinue their multichannel TV subscriptions and switch to internet-connected streaming services. Over-the-Top (“OTT”) streaming devices such as Roku and […]

User Perceptions of Smart Home Internet of Things (IoT) Privacy

by Noah Apthorpe This post summarizes a research paper, authored by Serena Zheng, Noah Apthorpe, Marshini Chetty, and Nick Feamster from Princeton University, which is available here. The paper will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) on November 6, 2018. Smart home Internet of Things (IoT) devices […]

Internet of Things in Context: Discovering Privacy Norms with Scalable Surveys

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 […]