Arvind Narayanan is an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University who researches and teaches information privacy and security. He is an ardent member of the Do Not Track movement and is currently working on a tool that will give consumers more information about how their browsing activity is being monitored. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Princeton Echo: What got you interested in computer science, with a focus on security specifically?
Arvind Narayanan: For me, it was the ability to create. When you’re able to write a program and do things that formerly only existed as mathematical equations, you can use that to build useful apps for the benefit of the general public. That was very tempting to me.
I got interested in privacy from an intellectual side. I was very interested in cryptography. Gradually I started to understand the role of privacy in society and the broader conversations that were going on outside of the computer science community.
PE: What is the Do Not Track movement?
AN: Do Not Track is a web extension people use to push back against online tracking. When you visit a typical website, there are sometimes dozens of other companies on there who are part of that webpage. You don’t see them, but they see you. They compile information about your browsing history. All of this data is increasingly being combined together to paint a very accurate picture of you, which companies can use to make decisions on what to target to you.
This is where my work comes in: we see that people are concerned about their security, so in my research group, we look at some possible technical solutions to this issue.
We want to help bring tools that are going to allow consumers to take control technologically; to put pressure on companies to abide by user preferences around tracking. We’re turning the tools of Big Data on their heads.
Browser vendors have been very responsive to peoples’ privacy concerns. All of the mainstream Internet browsers have adopted a no-tracking feature. You can go in the settings and find a checkbox that says, “tell websites I do not want to be tracked.”
PE: Do you find a particular age group cares more about security than others?
AN: A lot of us like to think young people these days don’t care about privacy, but when you start looking at the data, a very interesting pattern emerges. For basically anyone, there is some aspect of privacy that’s important. For young people, what they care about is very different from what adults care about. Financial privacy is hardly important to them because they’re not really dealing with money that much. Instead, they care about privacy from their parents.
PE: What about companies that don’t honor consumers’ wishes not to be tracked? What can be done then?
AN: If companies can use Big Data to watch consumers, we can use Big Data to watch them. We can find out what information they’re getting from you, and who they’re sharing this information with. We do this across the top million websites.
PE: How?
AN: This has been the result of the blood, sweat, and tears of my grad students over the years. What they have done is they’ve taken a consumer Web browser, Firefox, and they’ve put enough hooks into the browser so that the browser sees and records basically everything on the page that you don’t see. What we’ve ended up creating is a bot that goes and browses websites—roughly one million per month. And then it’s able to record tons of information about a website.
PE: Is this something that hasn’t been done before?
AN: We’re not the first people ever to have thought of this. However, our approach has been the fastest and most extensive, using a consumer web browser.
We’re calling it the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project, WebTAP for short. What we’ve made available so far are research papers, data sets and code. These are for journalists and open-source developers and so on.
We’re starting to make things available for users in general. We’re going to start doing that sometime early next month. We’re going to create usable visualizations of these data sets so that consumers can easily figure out what’s happening with their data, and they can use that to determine what types of tools they should install on their browser.
PE: What would you say to someone who doesn’t think online tracking by companies is that big of a deal?
AN: The bigger question here is, “Are we architecting a society where everything is under observation?” In the Snowden leaks, there was a document that said that the NSA is actually using these advertising cookies for surveillance of individuals. So now it’s not just about your shopping patterns.
It’s really getting into questions of civil liberties. Whatever decision we want to make as a society, I’m not here to decide that. I’m just here to say, “Here’s the data. Use this data to make an informed choice.”
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