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Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

Publications and source records attributed to Lakshminarayanan Subramanian.

20 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Crowdsourced, Actionable and Verifiable Contextual Informational Norms

There is often a fundamental mismatch between programmable privacy frameworks, on the one hand, and the ever shifting privacy expectations of computer system users, on the other hand. Based on the theory of contextual integrity (CI), our paper addresses this problem by proposing a privacy framework that translates users' privacy expectations (norms) into a set of actionable privacy rules that are rooted in the language of CI. These norms are then encoded using Datalog logic specification to develop an information system that is able to verify whether information flows are appropriate and the privacy of users thus preserved. A particular benefit of our framework is that it can automatically adapt as users' privacy expectations evolve over time. To evaluate our proposed framework, we conducted an extensive survey involving more than 450 participants and 1400 questions to derive a set of privacy norms in the educational context. Based on the crowdsourced responses, we demonstrate that our framework can derive a compact Datalog encoding of the privacy norms which can in principle be directly used for enforcing privacy of information flows within this context. In addition, our framework can automatically detect logical inconsistencies between individual users' privacy expectations and the derived privacy logic.

cs.CY↗

TrackMeNot: Enhancing the privacy of Web Search

Most search engines can potentially infer the preferences and interests of a user based on her history of search queries. While search engines can use these inferences for a variety of tasks, including targeted advertisements, such tasks do impose an serious threat to user privacy. In 2006, after AOL disclosed the search queries of 650,000 users, TrackMeNot was released as a simple browser extension that sought to hide user search preferences in a cloud of queries. The first versions of TrackMeNot, though used extensively in the past three years, was fairly simplistic in design and did not provide any strong privacy guarantees. In this paper, we present the new design and implementation of TrackMeNot, which address many of the limitations of the first release. TrackMeNot addresses two basic problems. First, using a model for characterizing search queries, TrackMeNot provides a mechanism for obfuscating the search preferences of a user from a search engine. Second, TrackMeNot prevents the leakage of information revealing the use of obfuscation to a search engine via several potential side channels in existing browsers such as clicks, cookies etc. Finally, we show that TrackMeNot cannot be detected by current search bot detection mechanisms and demonstrate the effectiveness of TrackMeNot in obfuscating user interests by testing its efficiency on a major search engine.

cs.CR↗