News

I am an Associate Professor in Cyber Security at the University of Basel, Switzerland. My research focuses on privacy technologies, privacy metrics, web measurement, and smart cities. Most of this website is now maintained on my group's website at Basel.

September 2022: I am joining the University of Basel as an associate professor of cybersecurity

I am excited to join the University of Basel starting on September 1st! I look forward to continuing my work on privacy technologies with my new colleagues and students in Basel. To find out more, head over to the University's press release.

Paper accepted at Esorics 2022

My paper "A Machine Learning Approach to Detect Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users" was accepted at the European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (Esorics 2022).

March 2022: Book published: "Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems: Research Methods for Greater Transparency"

My book "Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems: Research Methods for Greater Transparency" has now been published by Cambridge University Press and is available as hardback and eBook.

The book explains on a technical level how big tech companies like Google and Facebook track users on the web and sell user profiles for advertising, and it teaches computer science researchers, students, and journalists how to audit corporate surveillance systems to make them more transparent.

The book companion website has more information as well as lecture slides.

February 2022: Media coverage in New Scientist

The New Scientist has interviewed me for an article about my recent paper on the contents and readability of privacy policies over the past 25 years (preprint available here)

January 2022: IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor

I am honored to have been selected as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor for the 2022-2024 term.

The first event in my tenure as Distinguished Visitor will be a webinar on February 24th (11am Eastern / 4pm UK time), titled "Machine Learning for Quantifying Web Privacy". Abstract and registration for the public webinar are available here.

November 18, 2021: Paper accepted in ACM Computing Surveys

Our paper "Security and Privacy in Unified Communication" which analyzes the security and privacy features of ten unified communication platforms, including Zoom, Teams, Webex, Signal, and Whatsapp, was accepted in ACM Computing Surveys.

April 4, 2021: Three encyclopedia entries published in Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy

I have contributed three articles to the third edition of the "Encyclopedia of Cryptography, Security and Privacy": Privacy Metrics (with David Eckhoff), Measuring Location Privacy, and Location Semantics.

February 2, 2021: Distinguished TPC Member for IEEE Infocom 2021

I was recognized as Distinguished TPC Member for IEEE Infocom 2021. This distinction is awarded based upon ratings by peer TPC members, fairness in review scores, and promptness in meeting various deadlines during the review process.

November 24, 2020: Paper accepted in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

Our paper "Designing Strong Privacy Metrics Suites Using Evolutionary Optimization" has been accepted for publication in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security.

March 20, 2020: Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

Our paper "Using Metrics Suites to Improve the Measurement of Privacy in Graphs" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing.

December 14, 2019: Paper published in Wiley Security and Privacy

Our paper "Challenges in Assessing Privacy Impact: Tales from the Front Lines" has been published in Wiley Security and Privacy.

July 26, 2019: Promotion to Associate Professor

In recognition of my research contributions and achievements, I have been promoted to Associate Professor Research / Reader at De Montfort University.

April 16, 2019: Paper published in Enterprise Information Systems

Our paper on causes of security failures, titled "Dying of a hundred good symptoms: why good security can still fail - a literature review and analysis", has been published in Taylor & Francis Enterprise Information Systems.

October 19, 2018: IEEE Senior Member

IEEE has elevated me to IEEE Senior Member status, recognizing my significant performance over a period of at least five years.

September 6, 2018: Paper presented at Workshop on Data Privacy Management (DPM)

I presented my paper "Privacy Risk Assessment: From Art to Science, by Metrics" at the 13th DPM International Workshop on Data Privacy Management (co-located with Esorics 2018) in Barcelona, Spain. The paper argues that privacy risk can be decomposed into factors contributing to impact and likelihood, thus allowing for more systematic quantification.

June 20, 2018: Paper published in ACM Computing Surveys

My paper "Technical Privacy Metrics: A Systematic Survey" has been published in ACM Computing Surveys. The paper analyzes the characteristics of existing privacy metrics and introduces novel taxonomies that allow to detect similarities between metrics and to determine which metrics are suitable in specific applications. In addition, we propose a method to select privacy metrics for specific applications.

June 5, 2018: Tutorial at AsiaCCS: Understanding and solving the privacy challenges in the smart city

I gave a tutorial on privacy challenges and solutions for smart cities at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (AsiaCCS 2018) in Songdo, Korea (together with David Eckhoff).

May 4, 2018: Paper accepted in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

My paper "On the Strength of Privacy Metrics for Vehicular Communication" has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. The paper is open access and already available as a preprint.

February 26, 2018: Paper published in IEEE Comunications Surveys & Tutorials

My paper "Privacy in the Smart City -- Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions" has now been published in IEEE Comunications Surveys & Tutorials.

In the paper, my coauthor David Eckhoff and I give structure to the fuzzy term "smart city" by systematizing the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities.

November 2, 2017: Senior Member of the ACM

ACM has elevated me to ACM Senior Member status, recognizing demonstrated excellence in the computing field.

September 14, 2017: Poster series "Inspiring Computer Scientists"

I have released my poster series "Inspiring Computer Scientists" under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

January 11, 2017: Paper published in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

My paper "Evaluating the Strength of Genomic Privacy Metrics" has now been published in ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS).

The paper presents a novel method to measure the strength of privacy metrics by requiring that metrics are monotonic with increasing adversary strength. We uncover serious problems with several existing metrics currently used to measure genomic privacy. The paper includes suggestions on metric selection, interpretation, and visualization using case studies for three real-world diseases.

December 13, 2016: Postdoctoral position available

We have a position for a post-doctoral researcher at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, in the area of privacy-enhancing technologies. The position is for one year, starting March 2017.

The researcher will work on the EPSRC-funded project PryMe to investigate the strength of privacy metrics (see http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant.aspx?GrantRef=EP/P006752/1).

We are seeking candidates with a PhD in Computer Science or a related area and an excellent publication record in privacy-enhancing technologies, ideally with experience in one or more of the following application domains: vehicular networks, smart metering, social networks, or data publishing.

https://jobs.dmu.ac.uk/webrecruitment/Default.asp?Section=Vacancy&VacID=10342

The last day to apply is January 12th.

September 12, 2016: Tutorial at ISC2: Understanding and solving the privacy challenges in the smart city

I gave a tutorial on privacy challenges and solutions for smart cities at the IEEE International Smart Cities Conference (ISC2 2016) in Trento, Italy (together with David Eckhoff).

August 1, 2016: ACM Transactions Paper tops ACM downloads

My paper "Gender and Performance in Computer Science" is now the most downloaded article in ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE).

May 23, 2016: Paper published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education

My paper "Gender and Performance in Computer Science" has now been published in ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE).

April 21, 2016: Talk at CSP:2016

I gave a talk at CSP:2016 Cyber Security Professionals in York, UK, to present my ongoing work on visualizing the strength of privacy metrics.

January 17, 2016: ACM Transactions Paper in Top-10 Citations

My paper "On the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks" is now the top 6 of highly cited papers of ACM Trans. on Sensor Networks.

January 9, 2016: Talk at IEEE CCNC

I gave a talk at the Workshop on Ambient Assisted Living and eHealth (AALEH 2016), held in conjunction with IEEE CCNC, to present our paper "User Interface Design for Privacy Awareness in eHealth Technologies".