April 3, 2024: Professor Zubair Shafiq ‘s lab research was highlighted by the University of California newsroom. In the article, Prof Shafiq sheds light on how social media algorithms may be fueling political polarization and advocates for corporate accountability and government regulation. [UC News] [Davis College of Engineering News]
Mar. 1, 2024: Congratulations to Gene Tsudik for being awarded the 2024 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium’s Test of Time Award! [ICS News]
Nov. 28, 2023: Congratulations to Gene Tsudik for being awarded the ACM SIGSAC Outstanding Innovation Award at ACM CCS 2023! [ICS News]
Oct. 23, 2023: Congratulations to U. Iqbal and the whole team for receiving the Best Paper Award for, “Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem”, at IMC 2023!
Fall 2023: ProperData has launched our “Privacy Frontiers” Seminar Series. Seminars will take place on the first Friday of every month; format will be either hybrid or virtual on zoom. Registration will be required for each talk, additional details on our event page. [Seminar Series]
June 20-30, 2023: We hosted our 3rd Privacy and IoT Research Exploration Workshop for 17 community college students at UCI in the summer of 2023. Program curriculum covered fundamentals in computer science and Frontier research related to smart speakers, voice assistants, and potential tracking and profiling of social media app users (e.g TikTok). [2023 Workshop]
Mar. 2, 2023: Congratulations to grad student Y. Nakatsuka, PIs J. Scott and G. Tsudik, and collaborators E. Ozturk and A. Paverd for being awarded the Best Poster Presentation Award for VICEROY at NDSS 2023!
Dec. 2022: ProperData members along with several collaborators across institutions and multi- and cross-disciplinary projects submit comment to FTC on Commercial Surveillance and Data Security. [Comment]
Dec. 2022: ProperData members have launched Nothing to Hide? A Data Privacy Podcast to inform and empower the general public on how to protect their online privacy. [Podcast Website]
Nov. 2022: Read our annual newsletter to see highlights of our team’s work on privacy research, policy and outreach in the 21-22 academic year. [Year 2 in Review Newsletter]
Nov. 2022: Congratulations to ProperData members for being selected to present their work on consumer privacy and data security at the FTC’s 2022 PrivacyCon.
Sep. 2022: Congratulations to PIs Shafiq, Markopoulou and Co-PI Tsudik for being awarded a Noyce Initiative UC Partnerships in Computational Transformation Grant. Their proposal on “Auditing Compliance of Data Privacy Laws in California” was one of 6 selected!
Aug. 10- 12, 2022: Research presented at the 31st USENIX Security Symposium included auditing of network traffic and privacy policies in Oculus Virtual Reality (OVR), ML-based approaches to detect ad and tracking request chains and a novel graph manipulation evasion technique, and the design of a minimal active ROT for low-end MCU-s.
July 12, 2022: Northeastern’s Piotr Sapiezynski, testified at an EU Parliament hearing on legislation regarding transparency and targeting of political ads. Sapienzynski shared research findings that Facebook’s ad delivery algorithm makes it more difficult and expensive for political campaigns to reach viewers with different political views.
July 11- 15, 2022: ProperData members presented three research papers covering Smart TV and browser fingerprinting techniques and a blackout-resistant anonymity network at the 22nd PETS Symposium in Sydney, Australia.
June 20 – July 1, 2022: We hosted our second Privacy and IoT Research Exploration Workshop for 18 undergraduate students selected from our partner institutions and community colleges throughout southern California. Programming builds on our successful exploreCSR workshop held May 2021. [Workshop] [UCI SSoE News]
June 1-2, 2022: A delegation of ProperData PIs and members attended the NSF’s SaTC PI Meeting in Arlington. Members lead a breakout session on “Privacy, Policy, and People” and presented a highlights poster of our second year work. [Poster]
May 23- 25, 2022: ProperData members delivered three presentations between the 43rd IEEE S&P Symposium and the 6th ConPro Workshop which was co-located with S&P.
Apr. 26, 2022: USC PhD Student, Jiang Zhang, presented work on a new adversarial approach to subvert online behavioral advertising at the 2022 NDSS Symposium. HARPO is joint work led by Frontier graduate students, Jiang Zhang and Muhammad Haroon, in PI Shafiq’s and PI Psounis’s groups.
Apr. 13, 2022: We hosted a joint virtual workshop with SATC Frontier SPLICE. The focus of the workshop was on smart IoT home devices and the new privacy and security threats, including national-security ones, arising from their rapidly increasing integration into consumer lives. Our panelists discussed the law, policy, and national concerns of these devices, in addition to the intersecting technical privacy and security aspects of IoT devices. [Workshop Recap]
Mar. 2022: We are hiring: The University of California, Irvine is currently accepting applications for a Postdoc. The Postdoc will write papers, assist with reports, and work closely with Lead PI/Director, Assistant Director, and PhD students. [Job Listing]
Nov. 2021: The first ProperData Annual Symposium was hosted on Nov. 4-5, 2021. The event was hosted in-person at UC Irvine, with options for remote participation. The Symposium brought together ProperData faculty, students, advisors as well as invited speakers from the industry and policy sectors. [ProperData Symposium] [UCI SSoE News]
July 27, 2021: UCI PhD Student Janus Varmarken, presented work on SmartTV Advertising and Tracking at the Federal Trade Commission’s 2021 PrivacyCon event. This is joint work between PI Markopoulou’s and PI Shafiq’s groups that appeared in the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2020. [Workshop Page]
June 2021: As our first year comes to a close, we reflect on the highlights delivered by our members in our June 2021 Newsletter. We leveraged online interactions to built a cohesive group throughout the pandemic and are excited to continue these efforts with in person programming next year. [June Newsletter]
Apr. 29, 2021: Northeastern PhD Student, Johanna Gunawan, presented her work examining how dark patterns differ across modalities of the same web service at the 2021 FTC “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light” workshop. [Workshop Page]
Apr. 2021: We hosted a virtual workshop on Research Exploration on IoT and Privacy, for undergraduate students starting May 8. The workshop exposed participants to the following research topics: IoT, cybersecurity, security, privacy, mobile systems, and networking. Students had the opportunity to interact with top researchers in the field, network, and get hands-on experience. [Workshop] [UCI SSoE News]
Oct. 2020: We are happy to receive Google’s exploreCSR in 2020. The project builds on outreach activities organized by of UCI’s Office of Access and Inclusion and Sharnnia Artis, as well as on research carried by the SATC Frontier, in order to engage and recruit undergraduate women in CS research, especially on topics related to security and privacy.
Sept. 2020: We hosted a virtual workshop on Privacy Aspects of Contact Tracing on October 2. The workshop brought together participants with technical background (security and privacy, networking, user interfaces), as well as policy expertise (data protection, disease surveillance, and other information-related aspects of public health). [Workshop] [UCI ICS News]
June 2020: We are excited and honored to receive the NSF Award 1956393/1954224/1955227/1956435: “SATC: Frontiers: Collaborative: Protecting Personal Data Flow on the Internet”. This is a collaborative project between four US universities (UC Irvine, Northeastern Univ., USC, UC Davis) and one international collaborator (IMDEA), involving 12 senior personnel. [NSF Press Release] [UCI Press Release]