[This is a joint post with Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate who is working with me on a tool to help users understand Facebook’s targeted advertising.] Facebook announced two days ago that it would make its ads indistinguishable from regular posts, and hence impossible to block. But within hours, the developers of Adblock Plus released an […]
A Peek at A/B Testing in the Wild
May 26, 2016 by
[Dillon Reisman was previously an undergraduate at Princeton when he worked on a neat study of the surveillance implications of cookies. Now he’s working with the WebTAP project again in a research + engineering role. — Arvind Narayanan] In 2014, Facebook revealed that they had manipulated users’ news feeds for the sake of a psychology study […]
The Princeton Web Census: a 1-million-site measurement and analysis of web privacy
May 18, 2016 by
Web privacy measurement — observing websites and services to detect, characterize, and quantify privacy impacting behaviors — has repeatedly forced companies to improve their privacy practices due to public pressure, press coverage, and regulatory action. In previous blog posts I’ve analyzed why our 2014 collaboration with KU Leuven researchers studying canvas fingerprinting was successful, and […]
The Web Privacy Problem is a Transparency Problem: Introducing the OpenWPM measurement tool
January 14, 2016 by
In a previous blog post I explored the success of our study, The Web Never Forgets, in having a positive impact on web privacy. To ensure a lasting impact, we’ve been doing monthly, automated 1-million-site measurement of tracking and privacy. Soon we’ll be releasing these datasets and our findings. But in this post I’d like […]
Do privacy studies help? A Retrospective look at Canvas Fingerprinting
January 12, 2016 by
It seems like every month we hear of some new online privacy violation in the news, on topics such as fingerprinting or web tracking. Many of these news stories highlight academic research. What we don’t see is whether these studies and the subsequent news stories have any impact on privacy. Our 2014 canvas fingerprinting measurement […]
