Since 2016, when the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal began to emerge, public concern has grown around the threat of “online manipulation”. While these worries are familiar to privacy researchers, this paper aims to make them more salient to policymakers — first, by defining “online...

The 2010s were a golden age of information privacy research, but its policy accomplishments tell a mixed story. Despite significant progress on the development of privacy theory and compelling demonstrations of the need for privacy in practice, real achievements in privacy law and policy have...

Facial recognition technology (FRT) has emerged as an attractive solution to address many contemporary needs for identification and the verification of identity claims. It brings together the promise of other biometric systems, which attempt to tie identity to individually distinctive features...

The design of search engines raises not merely technical questions but also political ones. Our study reveals that mechanisms guiding the most prominent search engines systematically favor (in some cases by design and in others accidentally) certain sites, and certain types of sites over others,...

To preserve search log data utility, Google groups search queries in log bundles by deleting the last octet of logged IP address. Because these bundles still contain identifying information, part of these search logs can be de-anonymized [27]. Without an external audit of these search logs, it...

Computer-enabled data collection, aggregation, and mining dramatically change the nature of contemporary surveillance. Refusal is not a practical option, as data collection is an inherent condition of many essential societal transactions. We present one vernacular response to this regime of...

This essay is about trust in the online world. It is not a manual on how to achieve trust, nor an empirical study of trust's presence or absence online. Rather, it is an attempt to show that the way we stipulate the conditions of the online world may be decisive for whether or not trust is...

The development of autonomous vehicles is often presented as a linear trajectory from total human control to total autonomous control, with only technical and regulatory hurdles in the way. But below the smooth surface of innovation-speak lies a battle over competing autonomous vehicle futures...