[Steven Englehardt is a first-year Ph.D. student in the computer security group at Princeton. In this post he talks about the implications of a recent study that we published in collaboration with researchers at KU Leuven, Belgium. — Arvind Narayanan] Online tracking is becoming more sophisticated and thus increasingly difficult to block. Modern browsers expose many surfaces that enable users […]
A Scanner Darkly: Protecting User Privacy from Perceptual Applications
July 16, 2014 by
“A Scanner Darkly”, a dystopian 1977 Philip K. Dick novel (adapted to a 2006 film), describes a society with pervasive audio and video surveillance. Our paper “A Scanner Darkly”, which appeared in last year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (Oakland) and has just received the 2014 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, takes a closer look at […]
"Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution", the NSA Statement, and Our Response
July 11, 2014 by
CBS News and a host of other outlets have covered my new paper with Sharon Goldberg, Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution: Warrantless Bulk Surveillance on Americans by Collecting Network Traffic Abroad. We’ll present the paper on July 18 at HotPETS [slides, pdf], right after a keynote by Bill Binney (the NSA whistleblower), and at TPRC […]
No silver bullet: De-identification still doesn't work
July 9, 2014 by
Paul Ohm’s 2009 article Broken Promises of Privacy spurred a debate in legal and policy circles on the appropriate response to computer science research on re-identification techniques. In this debate, the empirical research has often been misunderstood or misrepresented. A new report by Ann Cavoukian and Daniel Castro is full of such inaccuracies, despite its claims of “setting […]
Privacy Implications of Social Media Manipulation
July 1, 2014 by
The ethical debate about Facebook’s mood manipulation experiment has rightly focused on Facebook’s manipulation of what users saw, rather than the “pure privacy” issue of which information was collected and how it was used. It’s tempting to conclude that because Facebook didn’t change their data collection procedures, the experiment couldn’t possibly have affected users’ privacy […]
