Web Privacy Through Transparency: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis

Presented by Steven Englehardt from Princeton University

Friday, September 2, 2016
2:00 p.m.

Abstract:

In this talk I’ll present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking to date. Measurement is a key part of preserving user privacy online. The transparency brought by our past studies of browser fingerprinting has greatly impacted the tracking ecosystem. I'll dissect several new fingerprinting techniques found during our 1-million-site measurement and show how we were able to use OpenWPM, our web measurement platform, to discover their use. I’ll show how well current privacy tools protect against these technologies and detail how our measurement work can play a central role in controlling and regulating web tracking in the future.

Bio:

Steven Englehardt is a PhD candidate in the department of computer science at Princeton University and a graduate fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy. Broadly he is interested in studying privacy and security on the web, focusing on problems that relate to advertising, personalization, and data collection. He is particularly interested in the measurement and analysis of vulnerabilities that allow users to be tracked on the web and exploring how that tracking data can be misused.