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

The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

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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Chapters

1. Intro (00:00:00)

2. Introducing Umar Iqbal (00:00:27)

3. Umar explains why he focuses his research on bringing transparency into the data collection and usage (00:01:33)

4. How Umar addresses this transparency challenge with his work / research (00:03:00)

5. Umar details his research relating to transparency, data collection & use, with a focus on Amazon's smart speaker & metadata, & potential regulatory enforcement in the EU (00:05:23)

6. Umar describes his transparency-related work related to browsers & API's and the growing problem of using fingerprinting techniques to track people without consent (00:10:01)

7. Umar explains his approach to bring control to individuals by restricting privacy invasive data collection on the web (00:12:17)

8. Umar walks us through his ML technique, which detected browser fingerprinting scripts based on their functionality with the help of ML (00:15:27)

9. Umar's research to determine the prevalence of online tracking & measure the effectiveness of existing tracker detection tools like ad blockers (00:17:03)

10. Umar's research on early detection of emerging privacy threats: 'browser fingerprinting' & 'navigational tracking' (00:17:57)

11. Umar's investigation of privacy issues related to IoT: smart speakers and health & fitness bands that analyze user voice (00:18:37)

12. Umar's long-term research vision to enable an environment where users can reap the benefits of technology without losing their privacy by 1) enabling preemptive privacy protections; and 2) establishing 'checks & balances' on the Internet (00:19:24)

13. Umar describes a big developer & researcher challenge: the information they need to understand and mitigate the threats is not readily available (00:22:04)

14. Umar addresses how we can ensure strong privacy guarantees, especially around his research to make for a more accountable Internet (00:23:08)

15. Why regulations need technological support to be effective, and Umar's focus on building tools for regulators to detect infringements (00:26:41)

16. Umar describes his approach to building tools for individuals to exercise their data protection rights (00:28:40)

17. Umar's advice to developers / hackers looking for privacy issues via dynamic code analysis; the future of 'privacy bug bounties' (00:30:51)

18. Discussion of the recent academic-policy workshop: "Beyond the FTC: The Future of Privacy Enforcement" (00:34:39)

19. Outro (00:37:14)