This post was authored by Noah Apthorpe. On September 6, 2018, the California Legislature presented draft legislation to Governor Brown regarding security and authentication of Internet-connected devices. This legislation would extend California’s existing reasonable data security requirement—which already applies to online services—to Internet-connected devices. The intention of this legislation to prevent default passwords and […]
Privacy, ethics, and data access: A case study of the Fragile Families Challenge
September 14, 2018 by
This blog post summarizes a paper describing the privacy and ethics process by which we organized the Fragile Families Challenge. The paper will appear in a special issue of the journal Socius. Academic researchers, companies, and governments holding data face a fundamental tension between risk to respondents and benefits to science. On one hand, these […]
What Are Machine Learning Models Hiding?
July 26, 2018 by
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, […]
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 […]
