[talks] Shivam Agarwal will present his MSE talk on Monday, May 9th at 5 pm in CS 302.

[Nicki Gotsis]

Shivam Agarwal will present his MSE talk on Monday, May 9th at 5 pm in CS 302.

The members of his committee are Arvind Narayanan (adviser) and Jennifer Rexford. 

Everyone is welcome to attend.

The talk title and abstract follow below.

Title: Using Machine Learning to detect online tracking

Abstract: Currently, the tools which are being used to detect online tracking like ad blocker, ghostery, etc. rely on huge manually labelled lists of urls or regular expressions making it unscalable and less accurate as the web grows. My work has been to develop a tool which will use machine learning on the fly to detect tracking websites. We construct feature vectors from the behavior of these websites on user’s browser and then classify them as tracking or non-tracking. This has an added advantage of behavioral tracking detection besides the syntactic url based tracking detection which current tools do. Our analysis over the data crawled by OpenWPM (a tool developed by CITP which crawls websites and logs data) over top 100K sites has given us as high as 98.5% accuracy with as low as 0.5% false positive rate.