Abstract:

Internet privacy became a hot topic with the radical growth of Online Social Networks (OSN) and attendant publicity about various leakages.  For several years, we examined aggregation of user’s information by a steadily decreasing number of entities as unrelated websites are browsed.  I’ll present results from several studies on leakage of personally identifiable information (PII) via Online Social Networks and popular non-OSN sites.  Linkage of information gleaned from different sources presents a challenging problem to technologists, privacy advocates, government agencies, and the multibillion dollar online advertising industry.  Economics might hold the key in increasing transparency of the largely hidden exchange of data in return for access of so-called free services.  I’ll also talk briefly about transient online social Networks.

Bio:

Balachander Krishnamurthy is a lead inventive scientist at AT&T Labs-Research.  His focus of research is in the areas of Internet privacy, transparency, and fairness in ML algorithms, and Internet measurements.  He has authored and edited ten books, published over one hundred technical papers, holds seventy five patents, and has given invited talks in thirty five countries.He co-founded the successful ACM Internet Measurement Conference in 2000 and in 2013 the Conference on Online Social Networks and is involved in the Data Transparency Lab efforts to fund privacy research.  He has been on the thesis committee of several PhD students, collaborated with over eighty researchers worldwide, and given tutorials at several industrial sites and conferences.