The 2016 election was one of the most eventful in U.S. history. We will be debating its consequences for a long time. For those of us who pay attention to the security and reliability of elections, the 2016 election teaches some important lessons. I’ll review some of them in this post. First, though, let’s review […]
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 […]
Innovation in Network Measurement Can and Should Affect the Future of Internet Privacy
May 8, 2017 by
As most readers are likely aware, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a rule last fall governing how Internet service providers (ISPs) can gather and share data about consumers that was recently rolled back through the Congressional Review Act. The media stoked consumer fear with headlines such as “For Sale: Your Private Browsing History” and comments […]
Dissecting the (Likely) Forthcoming Repeal of the FCC’s Privacy Rulemaking
April 3, 2017 by
Last week, the House and Senate both passed a joint resolution that prevents the new privacy rules from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from taking effect; the rules were released by the FCC last November, and would have bound Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United States to a set of practices concerning the collection and […]
Questions for the FBI on Encryption Mandates
March 29, 2017 by
I wrote on Monday about how to analyze a proposal to mandate access to encrypted data. FBI Director James Comey, at the University of Texas last week, talked about encryption policy and his hope that some kind of exceptional access for law enforcement will become available. (Here’s a video.) Let’s look at what Director Comey […]
