April 27, 2024

No boundaries: Exfiltration of personal data by session-replay scripts

This is the first post in our “No Boundaries” series, in which we reveal how third-party scripts on websites have been extracting personal information in increasingly intrusive ways. [0] by Steven Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan Update: we’ve released our data — the list of sites with session-replay scripts, and the sites where we’ve […]

Getting serious about research ethics: Security and Internet Measurement

[This blog post is a continuation of our series about research ethics in computer science that we started last week] Research projects in the information security and Internet measurement sub-disciplines typically interact with third-party systems or devices to collect a large amounts of data. Scholars engaging in these fields are interested to collect data about […]

Help us improve the usability of Tor and onion services!

Update 2017-09-11: We have collected several hundred responses, so we are now closing the survey to begin data analysis. Thanks for your help! We are looking for volunteers for a study to improve the usability of Tor and onion services, but first some background: The Tor network is primarily known for client anonymity, that is, users […]

When the cookie meets the blockchain

Cryptocurrencies are portrayed as a more anonymous and less traceable method of payment than credit cards. So if you shop online and pay with Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency, how much privacy do you have? In a new paper, we show just how little. Websites including shopping sites typically have dozens of third-party trackers per site. […]

Web Census Notebook: A new tool for studying web privacy

As part of the Web Transparency and Accountability Project, we’ve been visiting the web’s top 1 million sites every month using our open-source privacy measurement tool OpenWPM. This has led to numerous worrying findings such as the systematic abuse of newly introduced web features for fingerprinting, leading to better privacy tools and occasionally strong responses […]