January 6, 2025

The Unknown History of Digital Cash

How could we create “a digital equivalent to cash, something that could be created but not forged, exchanged but not copied, and which reveals nothing about its users”? Why would we need this digital currency? Dr. Finn Brunton, Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU, discussed his new book Digital Cash: […]

CITP Call for Visitors 2020-21

The Center for Information Technology Policy is an interdisciplinary research center at Princeton University that sits at the crossroads of engineering, the social sciences, law, and policy. CITP seeks applicants for various visiting positions each year. Visitors are expected to live in or near Princeton and to be in residence at CITP on a daily basis. They […]

Enhancing the Security of Data Breach Notifications and Settlement Notices

[This post was jointly written by Ryan Amos, Mihir Kshirsagar, Ed Felten, and Arvind Narayanan.] We couldn’t help noticing that the recent Yahoo and Equifax data breach settlement notifications look a lot like phishing emails. The notifications make it hard for users to distinguish real settlement notifications from scams. For example, they direct users to […]

Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection

By Jonathan Mayer and Arvind Narayanan. Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record […]

Should we regulate the makers or users of insecure IoTs?

By Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Danny Yuxing Huang, Tithi Chattopadhyay, Nick Feamster, and S. Matthew Weinberg Recent years have seen a proliferation of “smart-home” or IoT devices, many of which are known to contain security vulnerabilities that have been exploited to launch high-profile attacks and disrupt Internet-wide services such as Twitter and Reddit.  The sellers […]