[talks] Wednesday, October 7th-Colloquium--
Michele J. Brown
mjbrown at CS.Princeton.EDU
Thu Oct 1 13:00:47 EDT 2009
Title: On the Internet Someone Knows You Are a Dog
Balachander Krishnamurthy, AT&T Labs - Research
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.
4:30 PM
Computer Science Small Auditorium (Room 105)
Host: Jennifer Rexford
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