cs4.407 Online Privacy

Have you ever noticed during the phone setup or installing the apps, android phones ask permission for the apps with the options that vary with the software we use and Android 11 Allow while using the apps Only once Deny. Android 10 Allow all the time Allow only while using the app Deny Less than Android 10 Allow Deny Suppose you are using Android 11 and gives permissions to the apps as "Only once" or "Allow while using the apps". In that case, you may be safe to some extent from the privacy exploits. Still, suppose you click "Agree to All" concerning any android version you are using. In that case, it may cause many privacy concerns as the apps we gave the permissions can access the camera, location, storage, and share your data and exploit our privacy. But as per our survey, most people agree to all the permissions. So, We want to create awareness among the people regarding this by explaining the threats they will be facing and also suggest them with per...

Introduction Many websites collect, share, and use users’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Many regulatory bodies around the globe have long enforced requirements on posting privacy policies online. Over the past few decades, however, the collection, sharing, and usage of users' PII have risen to a major privacy concern over the internet, so much so that newer laws have gone into effect to protect user privacy. Prominent examples of such laws are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States. Research has shown, time and again, that privacy policies are too long and hard to comprehend for their intended users, and therefore users rarely take the time and effort to read them. Privacy Policies are getting longer over time and increasingly difficult to read. To address the poor readability of privacy policies, we have developed tools that leverage machine learning (ML) to automatically s...

  Introduction GitHub and LinkedIn are platforms very widely used by working professionals. However, these platforms present some privacy concerns which allow us to infer more than what was intended by the user. These inferences could be used to make hiring and firing decisions in companies  We have been able to infer whether a person wants to make a job switch, is actively looking for a job, or has received some work opportunity from the LinkedIn and GitHub activities.  We can also infer Twitter usernames for a large percentage of GitHub users, even though they have not explicitly linked their Twitter handles. This connects the professional and private lives of people and has serious privacy implications.  Linkedin Activity Analysis For Linkedin activity analysis, we first obtained 33 random profiles on LinkedIn. We created a new LinkedIn account for scraping these profiles and then used selenium for scraping activity data from their profiles. The activity data cont...

  Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash How many privacy policies have you accepted without knowing what the policy states? We're guessing that number is probably pretty high. And you are not alone. A  survey  of 2100 individuals conducted reported that 87% of individuals accept policies without reading them. Common reasons for this included the length and general readability of the policies. Of the top 500 websites, the average reading score was comparable to that of a high school student , while the average reading level of US adults is that of the 7th grade. Luckily, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help. For our project, we set out to detect the readability of current privacy policies (spoiler alert: you'd need to have at least completed high school to make sense of what you agree to). We also wanted to see how we could make the readability of the policies better. So what did we do with the privacy policies? We used privacy policies from the  OPP-115 Corpus ...

The acclaimed Netflix documentary   The Social Dilemma   unveiled hidden machinations behind social media and its control over billions of users. For our generation, the millennials and gen Z, social media forms a very important aspect of our lives. Almost all our experiences make it to Instagram as pictures, or on Twitter as texts, or Facebook Posts or even on LinkedIn. Tristan Harris, the primary subject of the documentary, has spent his career studying how today's major technology platforms have increasingly become the social fabric by which we live and think, giving these platforms dangerous power over our ability to make sense of the world. Following in his footsteps of uncovering hidden security issues, our team (Ayushman Panda, Kancharla Aditya Hari, P. Sahithi Reddy, Pratishtha Abrol, Snehal Ranjan, and V.J.S. Pranavasri) came up with the idea of this project. Where You At attempts to gauge how a person's location information can be inferred from his posts online. Loca...