S2E15: 'Watching the Watchers: Transparency & Control Research' with Umar Iqbal, PhD (University of Washington)

This week's guest is Umar Iqbal, PhD, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, working in the Security and Privacy Research Lab. Umar focuses his research on two themes: 1) bringing transparency into data collection and usage practices, and 2) enabling individuals to have control over their own data by identifying & restricting privacy-invasive data collection & usage practices of online services

His long-term research vision is to create an environment where users can reap the benefits of technology without losing their privacy by enabling preemptive privacy protections and establishing 'checks & balances' on the Internet. In this discussion, we discuss his previous and current research with a goal of empowering people to protect their privacy on the Internet. 

Topics Covered:

• Why Umar focused his research on transparency
• Umar's research relating to transparency, data collection & use, with a focus on Amazon's smart speaker & metadata privacy and potential EU regulatory enforcement
• His transparency-related work related to browsers & API's, and the growing problem of using fingerprinting techniques to track people without consent
• How Umar plans to bring control to individuals by restricting online privacy-invasive data collections
• How he used a ML technique to detect browser fingerprinting scripts based on their functionality
• Umar's research to determine the prevalence of online tracking & measure how effective currently-available tracker detection tools are 
• His research on early detection of emerging privacy threats (e.g., 'browser fingerprinting' & 'navigational tracking', etc.) and his investigation of privacy issues related to IoT (e.g., smart speakers & health & fitness bands that analyze people's voices)
• How we can ensure strong privacy guarantees and make a more accountable Internet
• Why regulations need technological support to be effective for enforcement
• Umar's advice to developers / hackers looking for 'privacy bugs' via dynamic code analysis and a discussion of the future of 'privacy bug bounties'

Resources Mentioned:

• Read Umar's papers: Google Scholar Citations

Guest Info:

• Learn about Umar on his website
• Connect with Umar on LinkedIn
• Follow Umar on Twitter

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