CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti on Why Privacy Matters at TEDGlobal 2013

CyLab researcher Alessandro Acquisti spoke on Why Privacy Matters at TEDGlobal 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 10-14. Here is the video ...



Some Related Links

CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti & Co-Authors Release 7 Year Study on Evolution of Facebook Privacy and Disclosure

CyLab Researchers Featured on CBS Sixty Minutes

CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti at TEDx Mid-Atlantic

CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti and Fellow CMU Researcher Christina Fong Win IAPP Privacy Law Scholars Conference Award

New Study Co-Authored by CyLab Researcher: Face Recognition Software and Social Media Result in Increased Privacy Risks

CyLab Researcher’s Study Shows Social Security Numbers Can Be Predicted from Publicly Available Information

A Distinguish Paper Award for CUPS, and Other News from Ninth Annual SOUPS 2013

CyLab graduate student Cristian Bravo Lillo presents at SOUPS 2013

The ninth annual Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS 2013) was held July 9th through July 11th at Northumbria University (Newcastle, U.K.).

Lorrie Cranor, Director of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security (CUPS), chaired the conference, and CyLab Associate Research Professior Lujo Bauer served as technical papers co-chair.

CUPS researchers Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julie Downs, Saranga Komanduri, and Robert W. Reeder (Carnegie Mellon University), Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Research), and Manya Sleeper (Carnegie Mellon University) won one of two Distinguished Paper Awards, for Your Attention Please: Designing Security-Decision UIs to Make Genuine Risks Harder to Ignore.

Here is a brief excerpt with a link to the full text:

We designed and tested attractors for computer security dialogs: user-interface modi cations used to draw users' attention to the most important information for making decisions. Some of these modi cations were purely visual, while others temporarily inhibited potentially-dangerous behaviors to redirect users' attention to salient information. We conducted three between-subjects experiments to test the effectiveness of the attractors. In the fi rst two experiments, we sent participants to perform a task on what appeared to be a third-party site that required installation of a browser plugin. We presented them with what appeared to be an installation dialog from their operating system. Participants who saw dialogs that employed inhibitive attractors were signifi cantly less likely than those in the control group to ignore clues that installing this software might be harmful. In the third experiment, we attempted to habituate participants to dialogs that they knew were part of the experiment. We used attractors to highlight a eld that was of no value during habituation trials and contained critical information after the habituation period. Participants exposed to inhibitive attractors were two to three times more likely to make an informed decision than those in the control condition. Your Attention Please: Designing Security-Decision UIs to Make Genuine Risks Harder to Ignore, Cristian Bravo-Lillo, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Julie Downs, Saranga Komanduri, and Robert W. Reeder (Carnegie Mellon University), Stuart Schechter (Microsoft Research), and Manya Sleeper (Carnegie Mellon University)


The SOUPS proceedings will be archived in the ACM Digital Library in a few weeks. All papers are also available linked from the SOUPS 2013 program page on the SOUPS site.

CyLab graduate student Pedro Leon presents At SOUPS 2013

CyLab's Dr. Lorrie Cranor Keynotes 13th Annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium

CyLab's Dr. Lorrie Cranor delivered the keynote for the 13th Annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (Bloomington, Indiana), Wednesday, July 10, 2013.

Dr. Cranor is Director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program and Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

She spoke on "Privacy Notice and Choice in Practice."

"Notice and choice" are key principles of modern information privacy protection. The various sets of fair information practice principles and the privacy laws based on these principles include requirements for providing notice about data practices and allowing individuals to exercise control over those practices. In the United States, privacy self-regulatory efforts focus heavily on notice and choice. However, there has been little follow-up to evaluate the effectiveness of notice and choice efforts in practice -- to determine whether individuals provided with notice are able to make informed choices that align with their expectations of privacy...

Dr. Cranor's CUPS team has conducted empirical evaluations of a variety of notice and choice mechanisms, including privacy policies, the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), online behavioral advertising opt-out tools, privacy nutrition labels, the AdChoices icon, and the standard form privacy notice for financial institutions.

In her keynote, Dr. Cranor provided background on notice and choice and presented several of of her team's empirical studies, highlighting both areas where notice and choice approaches show promise, as well as areas where existing notice and choice tools appear to be largely ineffective. In addition to discussing features of the notices and tools themselves, she also discussed the problems of incentives and enforcement, which continue to plague notice and choice efforts.

The full presentation in .pdf format can be viewed here.

Studies referenced in Dr. Cranor's keynote included:

Necessary But Not Sufficient: Standardized Mechanisms for Privacy Notice and Choice

Smart, Useful, Scary, Creepy: Perceptions of Online Behavioral Advertising

What Do Online Behavioral Advertising Disclosures Communicate to Users?

Why Johnny Can’t Opt Out: A Usability Evaluation of Tools to Limit Online Behavioral Advertising

Are They Actually Any Different? Comparing Thousands of Financial Institutions’ Privacy Practices

CyLab's Strong Presence Continues at Annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

Min Suk Kang with fellow CyLab grad student, after presenting The Crossfire Attack at
34th Annual IEEE Security & Privacy Symposium (May 2013, San Francisco).

The 34th annual IEEE Security and Privacy Symposium was held May 19-22 2013, in downtown San Francisco. Once again, as in recent years, Carnegie Mellon University CyLab researchers made a significant contribution to both its content and its tone.

CyLab Distinguished Fellow Adrian Perrig served as one of the three Program Chairs, along with Wenke Lee of Georgia Tech and Michael Backes of Saarland University.

Also, four of the thirteen Session Chairs were current or former CyLab researchers: current faculty members Lujo Bauer and Anupam Datta, and former faculty members Jon McCune, now with Google, and Bryan Parno, now with Microsoft Research.

Two CyLab papers were among the thirty-eight presented: The Crossfire Attack authored by Min Suk Kang, Soo Bum Lee and Virgil D. Gligor of CyLab, and Design, Implementation and Verification of an eXtensible and Modular Hypervisor Framework authored by CyLab researchers Amit Vasudevan, Limin Jia, James Newsome and Anupam Datta, along with Sagar Chaki of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University) and Jonathan M. McCune of Google (a former CyLab researcher, as mentioned above).

Furthermore, the Best Paper Award went to Bryan Parno for Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation, co-authored with Craig Gentry and Mariana Raykova of IBM Research and Jon Howell, also of Microsoft Research. Before he went to Microsoft, Parno did his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University CyLab under the supervision of Adrian Perrig, and his dissertation won the 2010 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

Here are excerpts from the two CyLab papers presented, with links to the full texts:

In this paper, we present the Crossfire attack. This attack can effectively cut off the Internet connections of a targeted enterprise (e.g., a university campus, a military base, a set of energy distribution stations); it can also disable up to 53% of the total number of Internet connections of some US states, and up to about 33% of all the connections of the West Coast of the US. The attack has the hallmarks of Internet terrorism3: it is low cost using legitimate-looking means (e.g., low-intensity, protocol conforming traffic); its locus cannot be anticipated and it cannot be detected until substantial, persistent damage is done; and most importantly, it is indirect: the immediate target of the attack (i.e., selected Internet links) is not necessarily the intended victim (i.e., an end-point enterprise, state, region, or small country). The low cost of the attack (viz., Section IV), would also enable a perpetrator to blackmail the victim. The Crossfire Attack , Min Suk Kang, Soo Bum Lee and Virgil D. Gligor (Carnegie Mellon University CyLab)

We propose an eXtensible and Modular HypervisorFramework (XMHF) which strives to be a comprehensible and flexible platform for building hypervisor applications (“hypapps”). XMHF is based on a design methodology that enables automated verification of hypervisor memory integrity. In particular, the automated verification was performed on the actual source code of XMHF – consisting of 5208 lines of C code – using the CBMC model checker. We believe that XMHF provides a good starting point for research and development on hypervisors with rigorous and “designed-in” security guarantees. Given XMHF’s features and performance characteristics, we believe that it can significantly enhance (security-oriented) hypervisor research and development. Design, Implementation and Verification of an eXtensible and Modular Hypervisor Framework, Amit Vasudevan, Limin Jia, James Newsome and Anupam Datta (Carnegie Mellon University CyLab), Sagar Chaki (SEI, Carnegie Mellon University) and Jonathan M. McCune (Google)

Some Related Posts
 
CyLab Chronicles: CyLab's Strong Presence at IEEE Security and Privacy 2012 Packs A Wallop

CyLab Research has Powerful Impact on 2010 IEEE Security & Privacy Symposium

CyLab Researchers Virgil Gligor and David Brumley Receive Honors

CyLab researcher Bryan Parno wins ACM 2010 Doctoral Dissertation Award

Parno, McCune and Perrig Author Book on Bootstrapping Trust in Modern Computing

-- Richard Power

CyLab Researchers Alessadro Acquisti and Marios Savviddes featured on CBS Sixty Minutes

[NOTE: This CyBlog story is cross-posted as a CyLab Chronicles on the CyLab home page.]

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, there has been some mainstream news media attention paid to facial recognition software. After years of NCIS and other popular law enforcement TV dramas, there is an expectation that such technology could have led to a speedier conclusion to the manhunt, or perhaps even have prevented the savage attack.

In recent weeks, looking for meaningful answers, major news organizations turned to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University CyLab. Why? Because they are at the forefront of research into related technologies; and that's the forefront of not only research on how to deliver these technologies, but also the forefront on their broader implications on society as a whole.

On the May 19th edition of CBS Sixty Minutes, the work of two Carnegie Mellon University CyLab researchers were featured: Alessandro Acquisti, Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy (Heinz College), author of some blockbuster privacy studies, related to the convergence of facial recognition software and social media and other vital issues, and Marios Savvides, Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor (Electrical and Computer Engineering Department) and Director of the CyLab Biometrics Center.

Here is the CBS Sixty Minutes video, followed by some transcript excerpts:


This may look like a high school science project, but this is Carnegie Mellon's CyLab, a world-class research center.

[Lesley Stahl: Look at that!]

Marios Savvides and his students outfitted this ordinary toy drone with their new advanced facial recognition software... that locks in on a face from a distance, and then identifies it. [Drone: Hello Lesley, nice to see you.

Lesley Stahl: It got it.]

The students are taking surveillance technology to the next level. They can now turn a blurry face into a clear one; a flat image into a 3D model.

[Lesley Stahl: Oh my goodness.]

Their technology can take a masked face and by focusing only on the eyebrows search a catalog of faces, come up with several people with very similar eyebrows and eventually find the identity of the person.

Marios Savvides: So Utzav is going to take a normal photo of you. The software maps a face using dots like electronic measles and creates something as unique as a fingerprint: a faceprint.

Lesley Stahl: This is your facial recognition technology working right now to find me? Utzav: Yes.

For this demonstration, they had added my picture ahead of time to the university's database. Marios Savvides: That's the top match.

[Samsung Lady: To use face recognition, use the color-coded button on your remote.]

Facial recognition is already in some of our home appliances like TVs. In our mobile devices, PINs and passwords are giving way to faceprints. And the technology can single us out in real-time as we go about our daily business, often without us ever knowing ...

Alessandro Acquisti: The ability of remaining anonymous is shrinking. And the places where we can be anonymous are getting fewer and fewer.

Alessandro Acquisti is a professor at Carnegie Mellon who does research on how technology impacts privacy. He says that smart phones may make "facial searches" as common as Google searches and he did an experiment to show how easy it could be. He took photos of random students on his campus. He then ran the pictures through a facial recognition program he downloaded for free that sifted through Facebook profiles and other websites. And he was able not only to identify many of them instantly, he also got their personal data, including in some cases, their social security numbers.

Lesley Stahl: In order for this to work, does the person you're trying to identify have to be on one of these social networks?

Alessandro Acquisti: You must have, somewhere on the Internet, a face with your name on it. Lesley Stahl: Well, let's say someone doesn't have a Facebook account, but his or her daughter or son does, and they've got your picture. So are they now automatically in the mix?

Lesley Stahl: Well, let's say someone doesn't have a Facebook account, but his or her daughter or son does, and they've got your picture. So are they now automatically in the mix?

Alessandro Acquisti: It's funny because one of the participants, before doing the experiment, told us, "You're not going to find me because I'm very careful about my photos online." And we found him. Because someone else had uploaded a photo of him.

But if an academic can easily mine our data with facial recognition, what about the government? Well, the government has a problem because to be effective, facial recognition requires a good database. Facebook for instance has one with billions and billions of photos. The government not nearly that many, and so the FBI is now assembling on these rows of servers the largest biometric database on Earth, costing over a billion dollars ...

Alessandro Acquisti: Often we are not even aware of how much data we are actually revealing or it is being gathered about us or, in fact, how it would be used. The idea that you can start from a face and predict social security numbers from that face seemed quite alien and surprising. But now we know that it can be done.

Lesley Stahl: So there's no place to hide, absolutely no place to hide.

Alessandro Acquisti: It's those places are shrinking.

CBS 60 Minutes, 5-19-13

(Savvides also appeared in a recent CNN news story on the same subject.)

-- Richard Power

CyLab's Marios Savvides Appears on CNN in Wake of Boston Marathon Bombing Investigation

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, there has been some mainstream news media attention paid to facial recognition software. After years of NCIS and other law enforcement TV dramas, there is some popular expectation that such technology could have led to a speedier conclusion to the manhunt, or perhaps even have prevented the savage attack.

Looking for meaningful answers, CNN turned to Marios Savvides, Carnegie Mellon University Associate Professor and Director of the CyLab Biometrics Center, a leading expert in the field.

Here is a video excerpt, followed by a transcript of the news story:



TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: "When the FBI released these photos during the search for the Boston suspects, there was hope that computers might help as they do on shows like CSI, comparing facial features with existing data and coming up with a name. But even though pictures of both brothers were in public databases, the computers that searched that data missed them, and came up empty. The government has been working on facial identification software since the 1960s, and companies like Facebook and Apple use similar technology to tag people in photos. But security analysts widely admit this technology is not good enough to spot a suspect in the crowd. At Carnegie Melon, Mario Savvides runs the CyLab Biometric Center.

MARIOS SAVVIDES, DIRECTOR, CMU CYLAB BIOMETRICS CENTER: While the toughest problems is low resolution, when you look at images collected from (inaudible) TV footage, the faces are way too small.

FOREMAN: His team is developing next generation software to change poor and partial images into much clearer pictures. They are creating programs that can reliably match images of people to their true identities, despite low light, movement, odd positions.

SAVVIDES: Off-angle is a big challenge. How do you match an off- angle image that`s say 50 degrees, 60 degrees, 45 degrees off angle to a face that`s just a frontal sort of, you know, passport-type photo.

FOREMAN: They`re even transforming flat pictures into 3D, look at what their lab did with a single photo of me. In less than an hour it was turned into a series of images showing how I might look from above, from the left, from the right. Savvides believes such programs can and will substantially improve the reliability of facial recognition and lead police to suspects much faster.

SAVVIDES: And ultimately, hopefully save life, because that`s our aim, that`s our goal, that`s everything we do here.

FOREMAN: For now, the FBI is installing its latest version of facial identification software to work with security cameras coast to coast as part of the billion-dollar program called "next generation identification." Still, in Boston, it wasn`t technology, but human investigators who triumphed. Tom Foreman, CNN, Washington.
 
CNN, 5-7-13

-- Richard Power

CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti & Co-Authors Release 7 Year Study on Evolution of Facebook Privacy and Disclosure

CyLab researcher Alessandro Acquisti's world-class work on the privacy implications of social media and other technological developments continues to deliver both sizzle and substance.

In this latest study, Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook, Acquisti, Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, together with co-authors Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, focus on "the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices."

"In this manuscript," the authors explain, "we use prole data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005, the early days of the network, and 2011. Our analysis highlights three contrasting trends. First, over time Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected proles in the same network. However, and second, changes implemented by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or in some cases inverted that trend. Third, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed privately to other connected proles actually increased over time and because of that, so did disclosures to "silent listeners" on the network: Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers."

In reflecting on the implications of the seven year study, Acquisti, Gross and Stutzman conclude:

"As our analysis revealed, a robust trend of declining public disclosure emerged over the years across a broad range of Facebook prole elements including personal, contact, and interest information. We also observed a signicant shift for many of these prole elements between the years 2009 and 2010, when public disclosure increased. We concluded that changes to privacy policy and interface settings by Facebook produced greater public disclosures. In other words, exogenous changes eected by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or inverted an endogenous, user-driven trend of members trying to protect their privacy by managing the public disclosure of their personal information.
On the other hand, we also observed that, over time, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users have revealed to friends' proles seems to have markedly increased and thus, so have disclosures to Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. Such ndings highlight the challenges users of social network sites face when trying to manage online privacy, and the power of providers of social media services to aect individuals' disclosure and privacy behavior through interfaces and default settings."

Silent Listeners: Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook, Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality (4, Number 2, 2012).

Related Posts:

• CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti at TEDx Mid-Atlantic
• CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti and Fellow CMU Researcher Christina Fong Win IAPP Privacy Law Scholars Conference Award
• New Study Co-Authored by CyLab Researcher: Face Recognition Software and Social Media Result in Increased Privacy Risks
• CyLab Researcher’s Study Shows Social Security Numbers Can Be Predicted from Publicly Available Information
• There is an Elephant in the Room, and Everyone's Social Security Numbers are Written on Its Hide
• Not Just Yesterday's Headlines, But the Day After Tomorrow's As Well
• International Privacy Day 2011: Insights into 21st Century Privacy from Carnegie Mellon Panel Featuring CyLab Experts
• Microsoft TAP Interview w/ CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti
• Video Record of CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti on "The Dish: It's All in the Numbers - Privacy, Math, and Social Security" at Koshland Museum
• CyLab Chronicles: Q and A with Alessandro Acquisti (2008)

-- Richard Power