Nothing to Hide? A Data Privacy Podcast

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...

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...

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. Specific...

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...

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 da...

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 highlight...

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) a...