Thursday evening, the Attorney General, the Acting Homeland Security Secretary, and top law enforcement officials from the U.K. and Australia sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. The letter emphasizes the scourge of child abuse content online, and the officials call on Facebook to press pause on end-to-end encryption for its messaging platforms. The letter […]
Watching You Watch: The Tracking Ecosystem of Over-the-Top TV Streaming Devices
September 18, 2019 by
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 […]
Deconstructing Google’s excuses on tracking protection
August 23, 2019 by
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?
August 13, 2019 by
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 […]
Is This An Ad? Help Us Identify Misleading Content On YouTube
July 9, 2019 by
by Michael Swart, Arunesh Mathur, and Marshini Chetty Ever watched a video on YouTube and wondered if the YouTuber was paid for endorsing a product? You are not alone. In fact, Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut recently called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into deceptive practices where YouTubers do not disclose that they […]
