Googling: I'm Feeling (un)Lucky

Presented at DEF CON 14 (2006), Aug. 4, 2006, 11 a.m. (50 minutes).

Birth, School, Work, Death. Imagine every web search you‚ve ever done placed on a timeline of your life. Is there anything on that list you wouldn‚t want your mother (or employer) to know about? How about the aggregate web searches of your entire company? What if they fell into the hands of a competitor? Recent trends indicate that we can no longer rely on the privacy policies of individual web companies to keep this information private. In this talk, we'll examine the many ways we disclose information in return for free web services as well as how effective you think your privacy countermeasures are. This session won't be a monolog, but an active discussion on the problem of web-based information disclosure. As part of the talk, I'm releasing a program that will extract web searches from your Firefox browser's cache to show you what you‚ve been disclosing.


Presenters:

  • Greg Conti - United States Military Academy
    Greg Conti is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the United States Military Academy. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the United States Military Academy. His areas of expertise include network security, information visualization and information warfare. His work can be found at http://www.rumint.org/gregconti/index.html.

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