Author: chris

We have performed terabyte-scale studies of internet tracking and of cybercrime networks, using a series of tools including Palantir Gotham, Palantir Contour, mitmproxy, STATA (Here is my STATA Cheat Sheet), Python, and a custom-built crawler. This has led to several insights, including new forms of consumer tracking in the wild (flash cookies, cache cookies), the demonstration…

This book is a historical account, an institutional study, and a discussion of policy choices made by the U.S. FTC. The FTC’s creation in 1914 represented a turning point in American history where skepticism of expertise and central regulatory authority was overcome by the need to address contemporary market conditions. My book connects today’s tussles over privacy…

Alan Westin’s well-known and often-used privacy segmentation fails to describe privacy markets or consumer choices accurately. It describes the average consumer as a “privacy pragmatist” who influences market offerings by weighing the costs and benefits of services and making choices consistent with his or her privacy preferences. Yet, Westin’s segmentation methods cannot establish that users…

        In a trio of articles (for NSF-TRUST), I showed how identity theft is an externality of credit granting, where costs of fraud are spread among victims, merchants, and society generally. For instance, the image below is summary data on an identity theft victim who I interviewed–the impostor in the case made…

Before coming to Berkeley, I worked in Washington, DC as a privacy advocate. I was struck by the character of policy debates there. Industries lobbied using a blend of libertarian and one-eyed public choice argument, repeating it so often that to me it sounded like simple cliché. In fact, it wasn’t debate, it was intransigence.…