Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, despite its claims of “setting […]
"Privacy Comes at a Cost" – The U.S. Supreme Court’s Opinion in Riley v. California
July 5, 2014 by
In Riley v. California, a cell phone search-and-seizure opinion delivered by Chief Justice Roberts for a unanimous Court last month, the U.S. Supreme Court squarely recognized, and afforded special protection to, the ubiquitous use and storage of voluminous electronic data of many different types on mobile devices today. The opinion holds that, without a warrant, […]
Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
July 1, 2014 by
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and how it was used. It’s tempting to conclude that because Facebook didn’t change their data collection procedures, the experiment couldn’t possibly have affected users’ privacy […]
Cognitive disconnect: Understanding Facebook Connect login permissions
June 18, 2014 by
[Nicky Robinson is an undergraduate whose Junior Independent Work project, advised by Joseph Bonneau, turned into a neat research paper. — Arvind Narayanan] When you use the Facebook Connect [1] login system, another website may ask for permission to “post to Facebook for you.” But what does this message mean? If you click “Okay”, what […]
Encryption as protest
June 10, 2014 by
As a computer scientist who studies Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, I remember my surprise when I first learned that some groups of people view and use them very differently than I’m used to. In computer science, PETs are used for protecting anonymity or confidentiality, often via application of cryptography, and are intended to be bullet-proof against an […]
