Hey folks! My Fall quarter class (OS capstone project) has been canceled, which means I'm on an impromptu short sabbatical until Xmas. I'm happy to travel a bit to visit and give talks if anyone is interested!

🚀 London friends! I’ll be giving a talk back at UCL on Monday! 🎤 📍 169 Euston Road, GF Seminar Room 📅 September 22 🕑 2:00 PM If you’re in town and interested in synthetic data and privacy or just want to say hi -- I’d love to see you there! sec.cs.ucl.ac.uk/seminars/

I'm aware that I'm known as a hater, but can someone explain to me why on earth anyone would willingly use Overleaf to work on papers? The only use cases that I can think of are: 1) emergency editing from someone else's device or iPad 2) non-CS co-authors not familiar with LaTeX

New: the inside story of how Tea collected millions of women's secrets, then exposed them to the world. We've found Tea raided women safety groups to get users; paid influencers to undermine others, much more. The “motive is money, not actually to protect people.” www.404media.co/how-teas-fou...

Here’s the link stanfordreview.org/uchicago-los...

Ever struggled with managing your pubs to create an NSF BioSketch using MyNCBI's My Bibliography? I think I have finally found a decent way to handle stuff, sharing in case it helps... (Step 5 is the one that took me the longest!) www.linkedin.com/posts/activi...

📣 Upcoming CCS'25 paper 📣 The Importance of Being Discrete: Measuring the Impact of Discretization in End-to-End Differentially Private Synthetic Data We investigate the critical yet overlooked role of discretization in end-to-end differentially private (DP) tabular synthetic data generation

Conditional congrats to Georgi and Sundar - their paper on Discretization in DP Synthetic Data was accepted with shepherding to CCS’25. Very important work on an overlooked aspect of end-to-end DP pipelines. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2504.06923 -- feedback welcome!

Really interesting work on CCPA-mandated compliance of data brokers with access/deletion requests: arxiv.org/abs/2506.21914 Highlights: - Almost half of the brokers don't respond - Only <5% of brokers provided personal data - No standard/easy way to submit requests - Requests for even more PII

TIL my Internet provider (Cox Communications) creates an access point ("CoxWiFi") from your WiFi router where other Cox customers can connect to at no charge. This was enabled by default and without my explicit consent. How is that legal?

Online abuse self-defense training for scientists "who appear in media and other public outlets, as well as their allies and employers" www.sciline.org/learn/online...

Once in a while, I stumble upon an old email of mine — the writing and grammar are awful. I used to feel embarrassed, riddled with imposter syndrome, etc. But for the last couple of years, I’ve focused instead on how much I’ve improved. Cognitive restructuring is such an underrated power…

Unlike traditional finances, all someone needs to access all your crypto is your passwords and they can steal your money and disappear without a trace. This incentivizes some horrific behavior all over the world.

Hi Everyone, I'm teaching a new UG class on privacy at UCR and I'm planning a lecture on human factors of privacy. Has anyone taught anything on this topic and would like to share notes/topics covered? I'd be super grateful!

Huge congrats to @spalab.cs.ucr.edu's Georgi Ganev for receiving the Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE S&P for his work "The Inadequacy of Similarity-based Privacy Metrics: Privacy Attacks against “Truly Anonymous” Synthetic Datasets." Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2312.051...

Georgi's paper, Understanding the Impact of Data Domain Extraction on Synthetic Data Privacy, will be presented at the ICLR SynthData workshop next week. A "tiny" paper studying the impact of how you extract the data domain from tabular datasets while training generative models for synthetic data.

I'm quoted in this @wired.com article about the recent (alleged) 4chan hack www.wired.com/story/2025-4...

📢 Deadline Extended for submissions to #CySoc2025 to ensure broader participation. 💡Share your research on generative AI, online safety, harms and threats, or political conflict in online platforms, with the leading minds in the field. We’d love to see your submissions. 📆New Deadline: April 10 AoE

And it was also amazing to be physically with Georgi (at Schloss Dagstuhl of all places) for the first time in 1.5 years when we got the news! :)

Happy to announce that Georgi's paper, “The Inadequacy of Similarity-based Privacy Metrics: Privacy Attacks against “Truly Anonymous” Synthetic Datasets,” has been accepted to IEEE Security & Privacy. Pre-print: arxiv.org/pdf/2312.05114

Not an urban legend — the sausage vending machine near the Schloss Dagstuhl exists! And they seem very successful too as it’s almost empty! Just outside a small backerei in the middle of nowhere. When in a Germany…

On my way to NDSS on the most amazing train. See y’all in a bit.

Waiting for S&P reviewers to respond to our rebuttal

I couldn't sleep last night.

The adjective sounds very superfluous

I’m proverbially humbled and manifestly honored by the ACM’s recognition as Distinguished Member. This is obviously an achievement that would have never been possible without my amazing students and collaborators or the support and mentorship of so many people. www.acm.org/media-center...

The final version of Georgi's TMLR paper, "The Elusive Pursuit of Reproducing PATE-GAN: Benchmarking, Auditing, Debugging," is now available at: arxiv.org/abs/2406.13985

Reposting this here, would love to hear your thoughts!

Sundar's upcoming WWW paper on browser fingerprinting is now available on arXiv arxiv.org/abs/2502.01608

It was fun to give an interview to Italian TV's TG3 Mondo, talking about our research on the toxic manosphere/womanosphere ecosystems. The segment (in Italian) starts around minute 25 at this link: www.rainews.it/rubriche/tg3...

Congrats to Sundar and Igor — our new paper on browser fingerprinting has been accepted to WWW’25. G’day, mate!

Happy to report that the paper "The Elusive Pursuit of Reproducing PATE-GAN: Benchmarking, Auditing, Debugging" led by SPALab's Georgi Ganev has been accepted, pending minor revision, to the prestigious TMLR journal. Pre-print: arxiv.org/abs/2406.13985

Want to connect with the brightest minds shaping the future of network and computer security? The NDSS Symposium (Feb 24-28) in sunny San Diego is THE place to be! We're talking 5 tracks, 220+ cutting-edge OPEN ACCESS papers, and world-class workshops. https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ 1/

I'm quoted in this Guardian article on the "femosphere," featuring our research on online women's ideological spaces (arxiv.org/abs/2303.07099). Joint work with Utkucan Balci, Chen Ling, @megansquire.bsky.social , @gianlucastringhini.com , @mrjimmyblack.com www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

Today at #NeurIPS2024, Sundar will present his paper "Nearly Tight Black-Box Auditing of Differentially Private Machine Learning." Starting 4:30pm in West Ballroom A-D, poster #6208. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2405.14106

Yay, UCR approved our proposal for a new undergrad course on Privacy. Can't wait to teach it this Spring!

Haoyang Li, a talented student from Diamond Bar High, just finished a technical report studying "User Perceptions of Soft Moderation on Social Network Platforms." Contact me if you have any questions or feedback you'd like me to relay! spalab.cs.ucr.edu/xyz/userPrec...

I created a starter pack for researchers who work at the nexus of HCI & cybersecurity / privacy here. Please do let me know if you would like to be added to the list!I'm sure I've missed many folks. go.bsky.app/RGsu5jn

Looking to move to California? My dept at UCR has four research faculty positions (AI/ML, Programming Languages, Graphics, Arch)! The positions are open-rank, so we will consider both junior researchers and associate/full professors looking to move. www1.cs.ucr.edu/cse-employment

Today at #usesec Sundar will present our paper "What do you want from theory alone?" Experimenting with Tight Auditing of Differentially Private Synthetic Data Generation (4:30pm, "Differential Privacy II" session). Full version: arxiv.org/abs/2405.10994

Bluesky: Network Topology, Polarization, and Algorithmic Curation https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17571

Proudly wearing the only publisher that never lets us down.

A few recent updates from @spalab.bsky.social! - Alex's paper, “Here’s Your Evidence”: False Consensus in Public Twitter Discussions of COVID-19 Science, accepted pending minor revision at CSCW - Mohammad's paper, BadVFL: Backdoor Attacks in Vertical Federated Learning, presented at IEEE S&P 2024

I really don't get the fuss about Google AI telling people to put glue on pizza when there's plenty of non-artificial non-intelligence telling people to put pineapple or chicken on it...

My article for The Guardian just dropped. "With no changes to how the industry operates and no watchdogs to check the abuse and greed that have defined it over its now-15 years of existence, we are doomed to see history repeat itself." www.theguardian.com/global/comme...

Beautiful short video of my home town area www.instagram.com/reel/C3MyCxn...

New Scientist coverage of our paper studying the cryptocurrencies community on Reddit www.newscientist.com/article/2412...

The submission portal is now available for the open faculty position in the UCL Information Security Research Group (permanent position, all grades). Applications close on 31 January 2024. The link and further details are at: sec.cs.ucl.ac.uk/hiring-2024/