Facebook tosses graph privacy into the bin
Facebook has been rolling out new privacy settings in the past 24 hours along with a “privacy transition” tool that is supposed to help users update their settings. Ostensibly, Facebook’s changes are...
View ArticleThe need for privacy ombudsmen
Facebook is rolling out two new features with privacy implications, an app dashboard and a gaming dashboard. Take a 30 second look at the beta versions which are already live (with real user data) and...
View ArticleWhat’s the Buzz about? Studying user reactions
Google Buzz has been rolled out to 150M Gmail users around the world. In their own words, it’s a service to start conversations and share things with friends. Cynics have said it’s a megalomaniacal...
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Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change
The book “Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change” is one of the first on the topic of digital activism. It discusses how digital technologies as diverse as the Internet, USB...
View ArticleSocial network security – an oxymoron?
The New York Times has followed up the recent Twitter hack with an online debate on social network security for which I wrote a short piece.
View ArticleCan we Fix Federated Authentication?
My paper Can We Fix the Security Economics of Federated Authentication? asks how we can deal with a world in which your mobile phone contains your credit cards, your driving license and even your car...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2011
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held at CMU. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2010, SHB2009 and SHB2008. The papers are here and the session...
View ArticleMetrics for dynamic networks
There’s a huge literature on the properties of static or slowly-changing social networks, such as the pattern of friends on Facebook, but almost nothing on networks that change rapidly. But many...
View ArticleCloudy with a Chance of Privacy
Three Paper Thursday is an experimental new feature in which we highlight research that group members find interesting. When new technologies become popular, we privacy people are sometimes miffed...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2012
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held at Google in New York. The participants’ papers are here, while for background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-11...
View ArticleCurrent issues in payments (part 1)
In this first of a two or three part instalment. In them Laurent Simon and I comment on our impressions of David Birch’s Tomorrow’s Transactions Forum, which we attended thanks to Dave’s generosity....
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2013
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held at USC in Los Angeles. The participants’ papers are here; for background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-12 which are...
View ArticlePsychology of deception
I’m at SARMAC, a conference with a number of research papers on the psychology of lying and lie detection. I’ll liveblog the relevant sessions in followups.
View ArticleWe’re hiring
We have a vacancy for a postdoc to work on the psychology of cybercrime and deception for two years from October. It might suit someone with a PhD in psychology or behavioural economics with a...
View ArticleCrypto festival video
We had a crypto festival in London in London in November at which a number of cryptographers and crypto policy folks got together with over 1000 mostly young attendees to talk about what might be done...
View ArticleSmall earthquake, not many dead (yet)
The European Court of Justice decision in the Google case will have implications way beyond search engines. Regular readers of this blog will recall stories of banks hounding innocent people for money...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2014
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held here in Cambridge. The participants’ papers are here and the programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for...
View ArticleSpooks behaving badly
Like many in the tech world, I was appalled to see how the security and intelligence agencies’ spin doctors managed to blame Facebook for Lee Rigby’s murder. It may have been a convenient way of...
View ArticleOur Christmas message for troublemakers: how to do anonymity in the real world
On the 5th of December I gave a talk at a journalists’ conference on what tradecraft means in the post-Snowden world. How can a journalist, or for that matter an MP or an academic, protect a...
View ArticleSecurity and Human Behaviour 2016
I’m liveblogging the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour which is being held in Harvard. The programme is here. For background, see the liveblogs for SHB 2008-15 which are linked here and here....
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