Computer Studies Bldg. Room 209
The widespread adoption of social plugins, such as Facebook's
Like and Google's +1 buttons, has raised concerns about their
implications to user privacy, as they enable social networking
services to track a growing part of their members' browsing
activity. Existing mitigations in the form of browser extensions
can prevent social plugins from tracking user visits, but
inevitably disable any kind of content personalization, ruining
the user experience. In this work we describe a novel design for
privacy-preserving social plugins that decouples the retrieval
of user-specific content from the loading of a social plugin. In
contrast to existing solutions, this design preserves the
functionality of existing social plugins by delivering the same
personalized content, while it protects user privacy by avoiding
the transmission of user-identifying information We have
implemented our design in SafeButton, an add-on for Firefox that
fully supports seven out of the nine social plugins currently
provided by Facebook, including the Like button, and partially
due to API restrictions the other two. As privacy-preserving
social plugins maintain the functionality of existing social
plugins, we envisage that they could be adopted by social
networking services themselves for the benefit of their members.
To that end, we also present a pure JavaScript design that can
be offered transparently as a service without the need to
install any browser add-ons.
BIO: Prof. Evangelos Markatos received his diploma in Computer
Engineering from the University of Patras in 1988, and the M.S
and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of
Rochester, NY in 1990 and 1993 respectively. Since 1992, he
collaborates with the Institute of Computer Science of the
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (ICS-FORTH)
where he is currently the founder and head of the Distributed
Computing Systems Laboratory. He conducts research in several
areas including distributed and parallel systems, the World-Wide
Web, Internet Systems and Technologies, as well as Computer and
Communication Systems Security. He has been the project manager
of the LOBSTER and NoAH projects, both funded in part by the
European Union and focusing on developing novel approaches to
network monitoring and network security. He is currently the
project manager of the i-code and SysSec projects. Since 1992,
he has also been affiliated with the Computer Science Department
of the University of Crete, where he is currently a full Professor.
Refreshments will be provided at 10:30 AM