Online world has enabled people to engage with each other and let them create online societies that have similar interests. However, as in many other technological advances, the online world faces a serious challenge: radicalist/extremist allowing them to create their own groups and empower their ideology. Extremists can fire up a group of people by bending the truth, spreading misinformation and many other “strategies”. This could result in life threatening and violent uprisings in a society (e.g. in Myanmar, Facebook posts targeted Muslims to justify ethnic cleansing in 2018. Islamist extremists to recruit people). If such behaviors are not analyzed well, they could damage our society unexpectedly and demolish our fundamental human rights. One particular example is misogynist extremism that has shown alarming growth in recent years. I'm Devris Isler and today we have Hussam Habib from the University of Iowa to enlighten us about misogynist behaviors online.

This week, we have Muhammad Haroon as the host and Hieu Le from the University of California, Irvine, as a guest.

In today’s episode, we’re talking about a particular tool that our audience is well familiar with - ad blockers. Ad blockers are used ubiquitously by privacy-conscious folks and normal users who are annoyed by all the ads they see online. However, few are familiar with the effort that goes into building and maintaining an effective ad blocker as the landscape of the web continues to change every day. We’re joined by Hieu today, a PhD candidate from UC Irvine, who will give us a behind-the-scenes look at the world of ad blocking and talk about his own contributions to making ad blocking more robust and effective.

For more information, check out his paper, "AutoFR: Automated Filter Rule Generation for Adblocking", which was recently published at USENIX Security 2023. In addition, check out the open-source tool AutoFR as well as the soon-to-launched autofr.org.

This week, we have Johanna Gunawan as the host and Kentrell Owens from the University of Washington as a guest.

In this episode, we discuss surveillance – a major concern for everyone in this always-on day and age. Surveillance has a long and complicated history and carries many risks for those being watched, especially so when conducting extremely invasive monitoring of protected groups. Specifically, today we’re looking at electronic monitoring apps used for tracking incarcerated populations. You might be more familiar with the concept of ankle monitors as often used for parole; now, smartphone apps provide a modernized alternative that offers stakeholders more features but also has access to much more data than their predecessors.

To help us learn more about the technical, societal, and legal risks of e-monitoring apps, we have Kentrell Owens, a PhD Candidate. In his paper, titled “Electronic Monitoring Smartphone Apps: An Analysis of Risks from Technical, Human-Centered, and Legal Perspectives,” Kentrell and co-authors systematically analyze sixteen e-monitoring apps across multiple vectors to get a better understanding of the e-monitoring ecosystem.

This week, we have Johanna, Umar and Hieu as hosts. It is a special episode, recording live, with a panel of guests in front of an audience. We’ll be unpacking the current state of privacy and exploring paths forward.

Our panelists are four professors from the ProperData Frontier project, which is the research center we’re a part of. ProperData spans 6 institutions, 11 professors, and more than 50 researchers. With us today are Athina Markopoulou (UC Irvine), Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis), David Choffnes (Northeastern University), and Nikolaos Laoutaris (IMDEA Networks).

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the panelists and hosts. They do not necessarily reflect the views of affiliated and funding institutions such as the National Science Foundation.

This week we have Yoshimichi Nakatsuka from the University of California, Irvine, presenting his work on VICEROY, a privacy-preserving framework for GDPR/CCPA-compliance to verifying accountless consumer requests. 

Every day a tremendous amount of personal data is being collected. Two well-known data protection regulations GDPR and CCPA enable consumers/users to have control over their personal data such as accessing,  modifying, and deleting data (right-to-be-forgotten by GDPR). These are important rights for digital citizens, and today’s guest will help us dig deeper into how to ensure that everyone can exercise these rights even if they don’t have a user account with an online service.

For more information, see the paper "VICEROY: GDPR-/CCPA-compliant Enforcement of Verifiable Accountless Consumer Requests" at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06942.

This week we (Hieu and Haroon) are talking about dark patterns, which are user interfaces designed to influence a user’s behavior across different mobile and web platforms. For example, requiring users to provide their credit card numbers when signing up for trials or nudging them into buying products using deceptive practices. However, more subtle dark patterns also exist such as simply highlighting the more egregious choice for the user in a consent form by default. Today’s guest, Johanna Gunawan (NEU), will provide us deeper insight into how these dark patterns emerge whether by intention or simple negligence. For more information, see the paper, "A Comparative Study of Dark Patterns Across Web and Mobile Modalities" at https://johannagunawan.com/assets/pdf/gunawan-2021-cscw.pdf. 

This week we’re digging into AdTech surveillance. We will discuss how advertisers track people across the internet to serve targeted ads. People generally rely on adblockers to prevent this. However, researchers have recently identified new methods to protect people’s privacy – including some that sabotage targeted advertising. This week we discuss these methods with our guests Jiang Zhang (USC) and Haroon Muhammad (UC Davis). For more information, see the paper, "HARPO: Learning to Subvert Online Behavioral Advertising" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.05792.pdf).