Mulled Chrome API shines light on long-neglected privacy gap: Sites can snoop on your find-in-page searches
May 27, 2020 | Thomas Claburn, The Register
Press
In an email to The Register, Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in Berkeley, California, and CTO of privacy analysis biz AppCensus.io, said he recently came across an ad tech company, AppsFlyer.com, that had implemented its own search box (type ctrl-F to see it) to handle find-in-page searches instead of relying on the built-in browser capability.
Accidental Activist: An Interview With Lenore Blum, Part 1
May 21, 2020 | Amanda Glazer, Berkeley Science Review
She later returned to Berkeley in 1988 to join the Theory Group of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). Lenore has also worked tirelessly to increase the number of girls and women in STEM.
New Study Shows That This One Thing Could Cause 80% Decrease In COVID-19 Cases
May 12, 2020 | Chris Westfall, Forbes
Based on research and scientific models from UC Berkley’s International Computer Science Institute and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, wearing masks can cut the incidence of cases by as much as 80%.
If 80% of Americans Wore Masks, COVID-19 Infections Would Plummet, New Study Says
May 8, 2020 | David Ewing Duncan, Vanity Fair
“I felt like this was pretty urgent,” said De Kai, who was born in St. Louis, and is the son of immigrants from China. “I saw the country where I grew up, where my family lives [now mostly in the Bay Area], about to face this pandemic without knowing much about something as simple as wearing a mask to protect themselves and others.”
Google Can't Shake New Mexico Suit Over Children's Privacy
April 30, 2020 | Wendy Davis, MediaPost
Balderas alleged in the complaint that 86 of Tiny Lab's gaming apps participated in Google Play's "Designed for Families" program, for apps aimed at children. He filed suit several months after researchers at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley reported that thousands of free children's apps for Android devices may be violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.
Some Developers Don't Know What Their Apps Do With Your Data. Here's Why.
March 13, 2020 | Kaveh Waddell, Consumer Reports
“Consumers are basically stuck,” says Serge Egelman, a Berkeley computer science professor and CTO of the privacy research company AppCensus. “If you download an app, there’s absolutely no way for you to know if it’s going to send your data to Facebook or Braze or Flurry,” he says, naming popular marketing and analytics companies.
The secret way most apps spy on you even when you think they aren’t
March 10, 2020 | Shubham Agarwal, Digital Trends
“Unfortunately, most developers might not know … how intrusive a given SDK can be when building their own software, while users are completely unaware of the fact that, when running a mobile app, there might be dozens of other organizations potentially collecting sensitive and personal data,” said Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, a research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute’s Networking and Security division and a member of the team that developed Lumen, an app that monitors which SDKs your phone is transmitting data to.
Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too
February 28, 2020 | Anna Merlen, Vice
Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, said that the response "gives you an insight into the various sources being scraped." He noted that Clearview is not just obtaining images from social media sites like Instagram themselves, but also from other sites that have already scraped Instagram, like Insta Stalker.
Here's why Big Tech is winning the war against the government
February 15, 2020 | Andy Serwer with Max Zahn, Yahoo Finance
“Huawei of course has the capability [to spy and steal secrets] but Huawei can say with a straight face that there’s no evidence of them having used the capability,” says Nicholas Weaver, staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute, University of California, Berkeley. “Countries with 5G have a choice: Go with Huawei and let China have an easy mode [to access telco networks.] Or go with European competitors and spend more money.”
Your phone talks about you behind your back. These researchers are listening in
February 13, 2020 | Alfred Ng, CNET
"In the end, you're left with a policy that's essentially meaningless because it doesn't describe what's accurately happening," said Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute. "The only way to answer that question is going in and seeing what the app is doing with that data."