Entries Tagged "privacy"

Page 38 of 145

Facebook Using Physical Location to Suggest Friends

This could go badly:

“People You May Know are people on Facebook that you might know,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “We show you people based on mutual friends, work and education information, networks you’re part of, contacts you’ve imported and many other factors.”

One of those factors is smartphone location. A Facebook spokesperson said though that shared location alone would not result in a friend suggestion, saying that the two parents must have had something else in common, such as overlapping networks.

“Location information by itself doesn’t indicate that two people might be friends,” said the Facebook spokesperson. “That’s why location is only one of the factors we use to suggest people you may know.”

The article goes on to describe situations where you don’t want Facebook to do this: Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, singles bars, some Tinder dates, and so on. But this is part of Facebook’s aggressive use of location data in many of its services.

BoingBoing post.

EDITED TO ADD: Facebook backtracks.

Posted on June 28, 2016 at 6:56 AM • View Comments

Comparing Messaging Apps

Micah Lee has a nice comparison among Signal, WhatsApp, and Allo.

In this article, I’m going to compare WhatsApp, Signal, and Allo from a privacy perspective.

While all three apps use the same secure-messaging protocol, they differ on exactly what information is encrypted, what metadata is collected, and what, precisely, is stored in the cloud ­- and therefore available, in theory at least, to government snoops and wily hackers.

In the end, I’m going to advocate you use Signal whenever you can -­ which actually may not end up being as often as you would like.

EDITED TO ADD (6/25): Don’t use Telegram.

Posted on June 23, 2016 at 6:54 AM • View Comments

Apple's Differential Privacy

At the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this week, Apple talked about something called “differential privacy.” We know very little about the details, but it seems to be an anonymization technique designed to collect user data without revealing personal information.

What we know about anonymization is that it’s much harder than people think, and it’s likely that this technique will be full of privacy vulnerabilities. (See, for example, the excellent work of Latanya Sweeney.) As expected, security experts are skeptical. Here’s Matt Green trying to figure it out.

So while I applaud Apple for trying to improve privacy within its business models, I would like some more transparency and some more public scrutiny.

EDITED TO ADD (6/17): Adam Shostack comments. And more commentary from Tom’s Guide.

EDITED TO ADD (6/17): Here’s a slide deck on privacy from the WWDC.

Posted on June 16, 2016 at 9:30 PM • View Comments

Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2016)

Earlier this week, I was at the ninth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted at Harvard University.

SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty or so people in the room include psychologists, economists, computer security researchers, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, political scientists, neuroscientists, lawyers, anthropologists, business school professors, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.

These are the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year; this year someone called it “Bruce’s brain in conference form.”

The goal is maximum interaction and discussion. We do that by putting everyone on panels. There are eight six-person panels over the course of the two days. Everyone gets to talk for ten minutes about their work, and then there’s half an hour of discussion in the room. Then there are lunches, dinners, and receptions—all designed so people meet each other and talk.

This page lists the participants and gives links to some of their work. As usual, Ross Anderson liveblogged the talks.

Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and audio recordings of the workshops.

Posted on June 3, 2016 at 1:36 PM • View Comments

Companies Not Saving Your Data

There’s a new trend in Silicon Valley startups; companies are not collecting and saving data on their customers:

In Silicon Valley, there’s a new emphasis on putting up barriers to government requests for data. The Apple-FBI case and its aftermath have tech firms racing to employ a variety of tools that would place customer information beyond the reach of a government-ordered search.

The trend is a striking reversal of a long-standing article of faith in the data-hungry tech industry, where companies including Google and the latest start-ups have predicated success on the ability to hoover up as much information as possible about consumers.

Now, some large tech firms are increasingly offering services to consumers that rely far less on collecting data. The sea change is even becoming evident among early-stage companies that see holding so much data as more of a liability than an asset, given the risk that cybercriminals or government investigators might come knocking.

Start-ups that once hesitated to invest in security are now repurposing limited resources to build technical systems to shed data, even if it hinders immediate growth.

The article also talks about companies providing customers with end-to-end encryption.

I believe that all this data isn’t nearly as valuable as the big-data people are promising. Now that companies are recognizing that it is also a liability, I think we’re going to see more rational trade-offs about what to keep—and for how long—and what to discard.

Posted on May 25, 2016 at 2:37 PM • View Comments

State of Online Tracking

Really interesting research: “Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis,” by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan:

Abstract: We present the largest and most detailed measurement of online tracking conducted to date, based on a crawl of the top 1 million websites. We make 15 types of measurements on each site, including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites (“cookie syncing”). Our findings include multiple sophisticated fingerprinting techniques never before measured in the wild.

This measurement is made possible by our web privacy measurement tool, OpenWPM, which uses an automated version of a full-fledged consumer browser. It supports parallelism for speed and scale, automatic recovery from failures of the underlying browser, and comprehensive browser instrumentation. OpenWPM is open-source1 and has already been used as the basis of seven published studies on web privacy and security.

Summary in this blog post.

Posted on May 23, 2016 at 5:33 AM • View Comments

Identifying People from Their Metadata

Jonathan Mayer, Patrick Mutchler, and John C. Mitchell, “Evaluating the privacy properties of telephone metadata“:

Abstract: Since 2013, a stream of disclosures has prompted reconsideration of surveillance law and policy. One of the most controversial principles, both in the United States and abroad, is that communications metadata receives substantially less protection than communications content. Several nations currently collect telephone metadata in bulk, including on their own citizens. In this paper, we attempt to shed light on the privacy properties of telephone metadata. Using a crowdsourcing methodology, we demonstrate that telephone metadata is densely interconnected, can trivially be reidentified, and can be used to draw sensitive inferences.

New research, but not a new result. There have been several similar studies over the years. This one uses only anonymized call and SMS metadata to identify people who volunteered for the study.

Four assorted news articles.

Posted on May 19, 2016 at 6:10 AM • View Comments

Documenting the Chilling Effects of NSA Surveillance

In Data and Goliath, I talk about the self-censorship that comes along with broad surveillance. This interesting research documents this phenomenon in Wikipedia: “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” by Jon Penney, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2016.

Abstract: This article discusses the results of the first empirical study providing evidence of regulatory “chilling effects” of Wikipedia users associated with online government surveillance. The study explores how traffic to Wikipedia articles on topics that raise privacy concerns for Wikipedia users decreased after the widespread publicity about NSA/PRISM surveillance revelations in June 2013. Using an interdisciplinary research design, the study tests the hypothesis, based on chilling effects theory, that traffic to privacy-sensitive Wikipedia articles reduced after the mass surveillance revelations. The Article finds not only a statistically significant immediate decline in traffic for these Wikipedia articles after June 2013, but also a change in the overall secular trend in the view count traffic, suggesting not only immediate but also long-term chilling effects resulting from the NSA/PRISM online surveillance revelations. These, and other results from the case study, not only offer compelling evidence for chilling effects associated with online surveillance, but also offer important insights about how we should understand such chilling effects and their scope, including how they interact with other dramatic or significant events (like war and conflict) and their broader implications for privacy, U.S. constitutional litigation, and the health of democratic society. This study is among the first to demonstrate—using either Wikipedia data or web traffic data more generally­ how government surveillance and similar actions impact online activities, including access to information and knowledge online.

Two news stories.

Posted on April 29, 2016 at 6:28 AM •

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.