Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Libert, Timothy; Binns, Reuben

doi:10.1145/3292522.3326019

Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science 2019

DOI: 10.1145/3292522.3326019

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Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Timothy Libert

Reuben Binns

Abstract: The democratic role of the press relies on maintaining independence, ensuring citizens can access controversial materials without fear of persecution, and promoting transparency. However, as news has moved to the web, reliance on third-parties has centralized revenue and hosting infrastructure, fostered an environment of pervasive surveillance, and lead to widespread adoption of opaque and poorly-disclosed tracking practices. In this study, 4,000 US-based news sites, 4,000 non-news sites, and privacy policies … Show more

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2021

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Cited by 2 publications

References 26 publications

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Putting trust into antitrust? Competition policy and data-driven platforms

Larsson

2021

European Journal of Communication

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Anti-competitive notions, it seems, are increasingly informing the critical debate on a data-driven economy organised into scalable digital platforms. Issues of market definitions, how to value personal data on multisided platforms, and how to detect and regulate misuses of dominant positions have become key nomenclature on the battlefield of addressing fairness in our contemporary digital societies. This article looks at the central themes for this special issue on governing trust in European platform societies through the lens of contemporary developments in the field of competition law. Three main questions are addressed: (1) To what extent are the platforms’ own abilities to govern their infrastructures, that is, to be de facto regulators over both human behaviour and market circumstances, a challenge for contemporary competition regulation? (2) In what way is the collection, aggregation, or handling of consumers’ data of relevance for competition? (3) How can the particular European challenges of governing US-based digital platforms more broadly be understood in terms of the relationship between transparency and public trust? Of particular relevance – and challenge – here are the platforms’ abilities to govern their infrastructures, albeit through automated moderation, pricing or scalable data handling. It is argued that this aspect of coded, and possibly autonomously adapting, intra-platform governance, poses significant anti-competitive challenges for supervisory authorities, with possible negative implications for consumer autonomy and wellbeing as well as platform-dependent other companies.

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Putting trust into antitrust? Competition policy and data-driven platforms

Larsson

2021

European Journal of Communication

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Domain name encryption is not enough: privacy leakage via IP-based website fingerprinting

Hoang

Niaki

Gill

et al. 2021

Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies

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Although the security benefits of domain name encryption technologies such as DNS over TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTPS (DoH), and Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) are clear, their positive impact on user privacy is weakened by—the still exposed—IP address information. However, content delivery networks, DNS-based load balancing, co-hosting of different websites on the same server, and IP address churn, all contribute towards making domain–IP mappings unstable, and prevent straightforward IP-based browsing tracking. In this paper, we show that this instability is not a roadblock (assuming a universal DoT/DoH and ECH deployment), by introducing an IP-based website finger-printing technique that allows a network-level observer to identify at scale the website a user visits. Our technique exploits the complex structure of most websites, which load resources from several domains besides their primary one. Using the generated fingerprints of more than 200K websites studied, we could successfully identify 84% of them when observing solely destination IP addresses. The accuracy rate increases to 92% for popular websites, and 95% for popular and sensitive web-sites. We also evaluated the robustness of the generated fingerprints over time, and demonstrate that they are still effective at successfully identifying about 70% of the tested websites after two months. We conclude by discussing strategies for website owners and hosting providers towards hindering IP-based website fingerprinting and maximizing the privacy benefits offered by DoT/DoH and ECH.

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Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Cited by 2 publications

References 26 publications

Putting trust into antitrust? Competition policy and data-driven platforms

Putting trust into antitrust? Competition policy and data-driven platforms

Domain name encryption is not enough: privacy leakage via IP-based website fingerprinting

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