This is the second half of our conversation with Arvind Narayanan, associate professor of computer science here at the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is a widely recognized expert in the area of information privacy and fairness in machine learning, with a huge Twitter following and a knack for explaining tech privacy matters in terms anyone can understand.
In this half of our conversation, he talks about why he’s so active on Twitter, but not the Facebook platforms. He talks about his research into “over-the-top” set-top devices like Roku and Amazon Fire TV, and how they provide content that looks like television content but takes your data like the Internet apps they are. He has critical things to say about Zoom, the platform so many of us are using to work from home. And he discusses one group of people who have seen their privacy actually improve as a result of social media.
When we use the internet, most of us don't think twice about entering our credit card numbers and we don't tend to worry that someone might be looking over our shoulder. Our guest today, Jennifer Rexford, knows better than most how the internet works and what kind of vulnerabilities exist that allow hackers to exploit its weaknesses. She's the Gordon Y.S. Wu professor in engineering, a professor of computer science and the chair of that department here at Princeton. She's won several awards for her research into the way internet traffic is routed. Jen is a 1991 graduate of Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Michigan. She worked at AT&T Labs before joining the Princeton faculty in 2005. ...
To kick off our second season, we’re honored to welcome Barton Gellman, Princeton Class of 1982. Bart has won multiple Pulitzer Prizes, including for his groundbreaking work with The Washington Post in 2013 to reveal widespread surveillance by the National Security Agency. The stories showed that even though they weren’t the targets, law-abiding American citizens could still find their private email, social media content, and online activity swept up by our national security apparatus. Privacy has long been a passion of Gellman’s, and today we’ll ask him for tips we can use to make our own digital lives more private, from email to text messaging to apps and the cloud. He talks about tradeoffs he’s willing to make to be a full participant in the digital revolution, as well as one popular service he distrusts so much, he vows to delete his account entirely. And we’ll as talk about his book, “Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State.” Bart Gellman was a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy a few years back. ...
As a chief computer architect at Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s, Ruby Lee was a leader in changing the way computers are built, simplifying their core instructions so they could do more. And she revolutionized the way computers use multimedia. If you’ve watched a video or streamed music on your computer or smart phone, Ruby had a lot to do with making that possible. In more recent years here at Princeton, her research has focused on security in computer architecture without sacrificing performance, which is what we’ll talk about today. And she’ll discuss why, even though it’s possible to build more secure devices, the marketplace doesn’t demand it. Ruby Lee is the Forest G. Hamrick Professor in Engineering, and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. ...
