arXiv subjects

Alishah Chator

Publications and source records attributed to Alishah Chator.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Organizing in the Digital Age: Understanding Community, Challenges, and Consequences in Digitally-facilitated Labor Organizing

The contemporary American labor force is highly dispersed, necessitating the use of digital communication tools to bridge spatial and temporal gaps in union organizing. This study provides an in-depth analysis of how workers within various labor unions utilize digital, text-based communication platforms -- including Discord, WhatsApp, and Slack -- for labor organizing. Through 17 qualitative interviews, we examine the challenges and opportunities presented by digital organizing, identifying both technical and social obstacles. Our findings reveal that although digital tools are integral to contemporary labor successes, they also introduce new complexities, such as navigating technical security, managing information overload, and building trust and consensus. Based on these insights, we draw connections to broader understandings of digital organizing and the role of digital tools in unions.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Making Sense of Private Advertising: A Principled Approach to a Complex Ecosystem

In this work, we model the end-to-end pipeline of the advertising ecosystem, allowing us to identify two main issues with the current trajectory of private advertising proposals. First, prior work has largely considered ad targeting and engagement metrics individually rather than in composition. This has resulted in privacy notions that, while reasonable for each protocol in isolation, fail to compose to a natural notion of privacy for the ecosystem as a whole, permitting advertisers to extract new information about the audience of their advertisements. The second issue serves to explain the first: we prove that \textit{perfect} privacy is impossible for any, even minimally, useful advertising ecosystem, due to the advertisers' expectation of conducting market research on the results. Having demonstrated that leakage is inherent in advertising, we re-examine what privacy could realistically mean in advertising, building on the well-established notion of \textit{sensitive} data in a specific context. We identify that fundamentally new approaches are needed when designing privacy-preserving advertising subsystems in order to ensure that the privacy properties of the end-to-end advertising system are well aligned with people's privacy desires.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2017

BlockSci: Design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform

Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific research and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical (rather than transactional) database, making it several hundred times faster than existing tools. We describe BlockSci's design and present four analyses that illustrate its capabilities. This is a working paper that accompanies the first public release of BlockSci, available at https://github.com/citp/BlockSci. We seek input from the community to further develop the software and explore other potential applications.

cs.CR↗