CyLab Seminar: Usable Privacy and Security
Time: October 3, 2011 - 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: CIC Building
Description:
All CyLab seminars start at noon and are held in the Collaborative Innovation Center (CIC) building in Pittsburgh. Seminars are open to faculty, students, staff and general public.
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Speaker: Lorrie Cranor
Talk Abstract: With growing recognition that website privacy policies are failing
consumers, suggestions are emerging for technical mechanisms that would
provide privacy notices in machine-readable form, allowing web browsers,
mobile devices, and other tools to act on them automatically and
distill them into simple icons for end users. Other proposals are
focused on allowing users to signal to websites, through their web
browsers, that they do not wish to be tracked. Industry organizations
have brought us web sites where users can opt-out of behavioral
advertising by their member companies, and a number of software vendors
and open source developers are distributing tools that help users block
cookies, trackers, or advertising. Facilitating transparency and control
through easily recognizable symbols and software privacy controls are
laudable goals. However, after 15 years of industry attempts at
providing privacy "notice and choice," we still have a dearth of usable
and effective tools that empower consumers to make meaningful privacy
choices. In this talk I will review a number of the proposals and tools
that have emerged over the past 15 years, including the Platform for
Privacy Preferences (P3P), a variety of privacy icons, opt-out cookies,
and Do Not Track. I'll talk about the lessons we learned from P3P and
how they may serve to inform current policy discussions. I'll also
report on some of our research assessing the usability and effectiveness
of consumer privacy tools.