cylab news

CyLab's Alessandro Acquisti & Co-Authors Release 7 Year Study on Evolution of Facebook Privacy and Disclosure

posted by Richard Power

In his latest study, Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook, Acquisti, an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's John Heinz III College, together with Heinz College co-authors Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman, focuses on "the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices."

Read More...

cylab in the headlines

Those meters that rate password strength work, until they don't - June 11, 2013
"Passwords are not going to disappear overnight, or in the next 10 years or 20 years," said Lujo Bauer, researcher at Carnegie Mellon CyLab. Bauer and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon conducted the study with 2,931 subjects who created passwords on sites using one of 14 types of meters with different displays and criteria for determining strength.

Limiting Risks Found in the Cloud - June 10, 2013
"We're hoping that the cloud service providers understand insider threat," Carnegie Mellon CyLab researcher Dawn Cappelli says. "We have recommendations that we provide for organizations for what they should do to protect themselves against rogue administrators and to protect themselves against theft of intellectual property. Our hope is that cloud service providers understand that as well."

“Hallucinating” a face, new software could have ID’d Boston bomber - May 29, 2013
Dr. Marios Savvides, the director of the CyLab Biometrics Center, said that the new technology could generate results much more detailed than those made by traditional image enhancement approaches. "The traditional methods yield about a 2 times to 4 times improvement" in the resolution of a facial image, he said. "This method gets us 16 times the resolution."

Facial recognition technology moving toward identifying almost anyone - May 20, 2013
But when the FBI released blurry, off-angle images of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings, researchers with Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Biometrics Center began trying to bring them into focus. Marios Savvides, director of the CMU CyLab Biometrics Center, told the Tribune-Review. “It's not exactly him, but it's also not a random face. It does fit him.”

"Big Brother" is big business? - May 16, 2013
Professor Alessandro Acquisti of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, says smart-phones will make "facial searches" as common as Google searches in the future. "One of the participants, before doing the experiment, told us, 'You're not going to find me because I'm very careful about my photos online.' And we found him," says Acquisti, "Because someone else had uploaded a photo of him."

[see all the headlines]

connect & stay current