Privacy

Privacy preserving schemes.

Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Investigating ad transparency mechanisms in social media: a case study of Facebook’s explanations Andreou et al., NDSS’18 Let me start out by saying that I think it’s good Facebook are making an effort to provide more transparency to advertising. It’s good that Twitter announced they will do something similar too. It’s a shame though that ... Continue Reading

Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Apps, trackers, privacy, and regulators: a global study of the mobile tracking ecosystem Razaghpanah et al., NDSS’18 Sadly you probably won’t be surprised to learn that this study reveals user tracking is widespread within the mobile app (Android) ecosystem. The focus is on third-party services included in apps, identified by the network domains they try ... Continue Reading

Semi-supervised knowledge transfer for deep learning from private training data

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Semi-supervised knowledge transfer for deep learning from private training data Papernot et al., ICLR'17 How can you build deep learning models that are trained on sensitive data (e.g., concerning individuals), and be confident to deploy those models in the wild knowing that they won't leak any information about the individuals in the training set? As ... Continue Reading

If you can’t beat them, join them: a usability approach to interdependent privacy in cloud apps

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
If you can't beat them, join them: a usability approach to interdependent privacy in cloud apps Harkous & Aberer, CODASPY '17 I'm quite used to thinking carefully about permissions before installing a Chrome browser extensions (they all seem to want permission to see absolutely everything - no thank you!). A similar issue comes up with ... Continue Reading

Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin Ben-Sasson et al., 2014 Yesterday we saw that de-anonymising techniques can learn a lot about the true identities of participants in Bitcoin transactions. Ben-Sasson et al. point out that given this, Bitcoin could be considered significantly less private than traditional schemes: While users may employ many identities (or pseudonyms) ... Continue Reading

A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names Meiklejohn et al., USENIX ;login: 2013 This week we're going to be looking at the five papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice selections on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts.' These papers are chosen by Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the ... Continue Reading