Presented at
The Next HOPE (2010),
July 18, 2010, 1 p.m.
(60 minutes)
TrackMeNot is a lightweight Firefox extension that helps protects web searchers from surveillance and data-profiling by search engines. It does so, not by means of concealment or encryption (i.e., covering one’s tracks), but instead, paradoxically, by the opposite strategy: noise and obfuscation. Because any query can plausibly be artificial, everyone’s search history ownership is now subject to a reasonable doubt. The challenge that TrackMeNot encounters is to search as a human. The adversary, a search engine capable of mining billions of user queries, should not be able to filter the artificially generated queries. Ideally, even a human should not be capable of filtering the queries that have been injected.
This talk will also detail the motivations in developing TrackMeNot: lack of transparency of search engines’ use of data and ambiguity of the privacy policies. Key elements of TrackMeNot implementation will be described and evidence will be revealed proving that a major search engine profiling algorithm is influenced by the use of TrackMeNot.
Presenters:
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Vincent Toubiana
Vincent Toubiana is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University (NYU) working on web search privacy and obfuscation. Before joining NYU, he worked at Alcatel-Lucent as research engineer. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science at Telecom ParisTech (French National School of Telecommunications) in 2008.
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