by Günes Acar, Steven Englehardt, and Arvind Narayanan. In a series of posts on this blog in 2017/18, we revealed how web trackers exfiltrate personal information from web pages, browser password managers, form inputs, and the Facebook Login API. Our findings resulted in many fixes and privacy improvements to browsers, websites, third parties, and privacy […]
Do Mobile News Alerts Undermine Media’s Role in Democracy? Madelyn Sanfilippo at CITP
February 12, 2019 by
Why do different people sometimes get different articles about the same event, sometimes from the same news provider? What might that mean for democracy? Speaking at CITP today is Dr. Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, a postdoctoral research associate here at CITP. Madelyn empirically studies the governance of sociotechnical systems, as well as outcomes, inequality, and consequences […]
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, […]
Against privacy defeatism: why browsers can still stop fingerprinting
June 29, 2018 by
In this post I’ll discuss how a landmark piece of privacy research was widely misinterpreted, how this misinterpretation deterred the development of privacy technologies rather than spurring it, how a recent paper set the record straight, and what we can learn from all this. The research in question is about browser fingerprinting. Because of differences […]
