Internet privacy: Towards more transparency

Internet privacy has become a hot topic recently with the
radical growth of Online Social Networks (OSN) and attendant
publicity about various leakages. For the last several years
we have been examining aggregation of user's information by a
steadily decreasing number of entities as unrelated Web sites
are browsed. I will present results from several studies on
leakage of personally identifiable information (PII) via
Online Social Networks and popular non-OSN sites. Linkage of
information gleaned from different sources presents a
challenging problem to technologists, privacy advocates,
government agencies, and the multi-billion dollar online
advertising industry. Economics might hold the key in
increasing transparency of the largely hidden exchange of
data in return for access of so-called free services. I will
also talk briefly about transient online social networks and doing
privacy research at scale.
Balachander Krishnamurthy is a lead inventive scientist at AT&T Labs–Research.
His focus of research of is in the areas of Internet privacy, Online Social
Networks, and Internet measurements. He has authored and edited ten books,
published over one hundred technical papers, holds sixty one patents, and
has given invited talks in thirty five countries.

He co-founded the successful Internet Measurement Conference in 2000 and
in 2013 the Conference on Online Social Networks (http://cosn.acm.org). He has
been on the thesis committee of several PhD students, collaborated with over
eighty researchers worldwide, and given tutorials at several industrial
sites and conferences.

His most recent book "internet Measurements: Infrastructure, Traffic and
Applications" (525pp, Wiley, with Mark Crovella), was published in July
2006 and is the first book focusing on Internet Measurement. His previous book
'web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching,
and Traffic Measurement' (672 pp, Addison-Wesley, with Jennifer Rexford)
is the first in-depth book on the technology underlying the World Wide Web,
and has been translated into Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese.
Bala is homepageless and not on any OSN but many of his papers can be
found at http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers