Five-College Speaker Series on Information Assurance
|
David Martin |
 |
This talk begins by covering the design, implementation, and deployment of the Bugnosis privacy enhancing tool. This software works by detecting Web Bugs --- those hidden, lightweight tracking devices also known as Pixel Tags, Web Beacons, and Clear GIFs. Bugnosis contributes to network privacy indirectly, without any technical protection measures such as filtering or anonymization, by raising awareness about Web bugs and arming users with specific information about current Web site practices. In 2002, we used Bugnosis to establish a lower bound on the amount of clickstream surveillance technology in place at a sample of Web sites. Under the narrowest definition in use, over 1/2 of popular Web sites and over 1/3 of those in a random sample of consumer-oriented sites carried Web bugs. Not only are Web bugs themselves invisible, but almost 1/3 of popular sites that carried Web bugs made no relevant disclosures about them in their privacy policies. We are now beginning to explore the prevalence of Web bugs in HTML email messages. The practice of email bugging is even more problematic than Web page bugging because the baseline identifier associated with the surveillance target is an e-mail address -- a far more personal identifier than a mere IP address. Biography: David Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at U. Massachusetts Lowell. He became intersted in Internet privacy as a graduate student at Boston University. At the University of Denver, he collaborated with the Privacy Foundation, a consumer privacy awareness and advocacy group. He is currently co-chair of the program committee of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop (http://petworkshop.org). | |