Speaker: Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T Labs--Research
Title: On the Internet Someone Knows You Are a Dog
Date/time: 4:30pm Wed Oct 7 (tea at 4pm in tea room)
Location: CS 105 (small auditorium)

Abstract:
 We have been examining the leakage of privacy on the Internet:
 how information related to individual users is aggregated as they
 browse seemingly unrelated Web sites. Thousands of Web sites across
 numerous categories, countries, and languages are studied to generate
 a "privacy footprint". I report on a longitudal study consisting of
 multiple snapshots of examination of such diffusion over five years.
 I'll talk about the technical ways by which third-party aggregators
 acquire data, the depth of user-related information acquired, the
 techniques for protecting privacy diffusion and limitations of such
 techniques. Such increasing aggregation of user-related data is carried
 out by a steadily decreasing number of entities: a handful are able to track
 users' movement across almost all of the popular web sites. Virtually all
 the protection techniques have significant limitations highlighting the
 seriousness of the problem and the need for alternate solutions.

 I will also talk about a recent discovery of large-scale leakage of
 personally identifiable information (PII) via Online Social Networks (OSN).
 Third-parties can link PII with user actions both within OSN sites and
 elsewhere on non-OSN sites.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/events/event/219