SUMIT_2017

Digital privacy is of growing concern, given the increasing use of technological devices that track object locations, revealing personal information regarding an individual's movements and activities. Although many children make use of this technology, for example with cell phones that track their location throughout the day, and sharing photos that are tagged with time and location stamps, little is known regarding how children of different ages evaluate digital tracking, and whether they are sensitive to violations of privacy. I report a set of experiments examining how children (4-10 years of age) and adults evaluate the hypothetical situation of someone using a mobile GPS device to track items such as a backpack or a pet that they either do or do not own. Results indicated striking age differences. Adults were consistently negative about someone tracking items that the tracker did not own. They identified possible negative consequences (such as stealing or stalking), moral principles ("It's an invasion of privacy"; "Without permission it's wrong"), and a vague sense of unease (e.g., "It's weird"; "He has no business to know where [my] dog is"). In contrast, children 4-10 years of age overall did not express such negativity. The youngest children (4-7 years) were actually quite positive about someone tracking others' possessions. These findings raise questions regarding children's digital safety and security. Without the skepticism displayed by adults, children may be vulnerable to those who might exploit their digital footprint to track their location or obtain private information. An urgent question for the future is thus how best to protect children, perhaps by educating children about potential dangers and providing clear guidelines and limits for how and when their phones and accounts should be shared.

Watch Susan Gelman's presentation.

Internet stakeholders such as ISPs and governments are increasingly interfering with users’ online activities, through behaviors that range from censorship and surveillance to content injection, traffic throttling, and violations of net neutrality. My research aims to safeguard users from adversarial network interference by building tools to measure, understand, and defend against it. In this talk, I will present Censored Planet, a system for continuously monitoring global Internet censorship. Censored Planet uses novel measurement techniques that remotely detect instances of interference almost anywhere on the Internet. Compared to previous approaches—which relied on having volunteers in censored regions deploy special hardware or software—this results in significantly better coverage, lower costs, and reduced ethical risk. This system allows us to continuously monitor the deployment of network interference technologies, track policy changes in censoring nations, and better understand the targets of interference. Making opaque censorship practices more transparent at a global scale could help counter the proliferation of these growing restrictions to online freedom.

Watch Roya Ensafi's presentation.