What the Yandex Leak Tells Us About How Big Tech Uses Your Data

Presented at Diana Initiative 2023, Aug. 7, 2023, 1:30 p.m. (60 minutes).

In late January 2023, almost 45 GB of source code from the Russian search giant Yandex was leaked on BreachForums by a former Yandex employee. While the leak itself did not contain user data, it reportedly contained the source code for all major Yandex services, including Metrika, which collects user analytics through a widely used SDK, and Crypta, Yandex’s behavioral analytics technology. While there has been lots of speculation about what big tech companies can do with the massive amounts of data they collect, this is the first time outsiders have been able to peek behind the curtain to confirm it, and what we’ve found is both fascinating and deeply unsettling.


Presenters:

  • Kaileigh McCrea - Confiant
    Kaileigh is a Privacy Engineer at Confiant, where she researches violations of privacy regulations and user rights in ad tech and builds tools to detect them, and consumes huge amounts of cookies. Before joining Confiant she was a software engineer at Swing Left and Vote Forward where she helped volunteers send over 18 million GOTV letters in the 2020 General Election. Her background includes software engineering, comedy writing, and politics, and when she's not working, she is usually reading excessive amounts and hanging out with her dog.

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