Increase Transparency of Data

Used by hundreds of millions of people every day, online services are central to everyday life. Their popularity and impact make them targets of public opinion skewing attacks, in which those with malicious intent manipulate the image of businesses, mobile applications and products. Website owners often turn to crowdsourcing sites to hire an army of professional fraudsters to paint a fake flattering image for mediocre subjects or trick people into downloading malicious software.

It is generally recognized that protecting online privacy is important, with modern society manifesting this concern in many ways. Preliminary research indicates that third parties, with modest crawling and computational resources, and employing simple data mining heuristics, can potentially combine online services and publicly available information to create detailed profiles of the users living in any targeted geographical area.

Today individuals and organizations leverage machine learning systems to adjust room temperature, provide recommendations, detect malware, predict earthquakes, forecast weather, maneuver vehicles, and turn Big Data into insights. Unfortunately, these systems are prone to a variety of malicious attacks with potentially disastrous consequences. For example, an attacker might trick an Intrusion Detection System into ignoring the warning signs of a future attack by injecting carefully crafted samples into the training set for the machine learning model (i.e., "polluting" the model).

The increasing ubiquity of mobile technologies creates unique privacy and surveillance challenges for users. These problems are global, but the way users, organizations, and governments approach these challenges varies based on cultural norms around privacy. This cross-cultural project evaluates how mobile users in the U.S. and the Netherlands think about and make decisions about their privacy when using mobile apps.

The modern web experience is dynamic, providing users with a highly responsive interface through which to interact with the world. Today's mechanisms allow servers---even those which are controlled by an attacker---to download arbitrary programs into a user's browser. It is extraordinarily difficult to secure the web browser (and its user) against attack in this scenario. While tools and techniques are useful to analyze and restrict downloaded code, they are by their very nature incomplete. As a result, the security of web services relies on a series of ad hoc, service-provided techniques.