Verizon’s practice of injecting a unique ID into the HTTP headers of traffic originating on their wireless network has alarmed privacy advocates and researchers. Jonathan Mayer detailed how this header is already being used by third-parties to create zombie cookies. In this post, I summarize just how much information Verizon collects and shares under their […]
How cookies can be used for global surveillance
December 19, 2014 by Steven Englehardt
Today we present an updated version of our paper [0] examining how the ubiquitous use of online tracking cookies can allow an adversary conducting network surveillance to target a user or surveil users en masse. In the initial version of the study, summarized below, we examined the technical feasibility of the attack. Now we’ve made the […]
Filed Under: National Security & Surveillance, Privacy & Security Tagged With: cookies, online tracking, Privacy, surveillance, WPM
Cookies that give you away: The surveillance implications of web tracking
April 4, 2014 by Dillon Reisman
[Today we have another announcement of an exciting new research paper. Undergraduate Dillon Reisman, for his senior thesis, applied our web measurement platform to study some timely questions. -Arvind Narayanan] Over the past three months we’ve learnt that NSA uses third-party tracking cookies for surveillance (1, 2). These cookies, provided by a third-party advertising or analytics network […]
Filed Under: National Security & Surveillance Tagged With: cookies, NSA, surveillance, WPM
Web measurement for fairness and transparency
November 25, 2013 by Arvind Narayanan
[This is the first in a series of posts giving some examples of security-related research in the Princeton computer science department. We’re actively recruiting top-notch students to enter our Ph.D. program, as well as postdocs and visiting scholars. We don’t have enough bandwidth here on the blog to feature everything we do, so we’ll be […]
Filed Under: Privacy & Security Tagged With: cookies, online tracking, Privacy, WPM
