Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
Berkeley, CA | May 31 – June 1, 2012

As the Web continues to transition from a static collection of documents to an application platform, websites are learning more and more about users. Many forms of Web information sharing pose little privacy risk and provide tremendous benefit to both consumers and businesses. But some Web information practices pose significant privacy problems and have caused concern among consumers, policymakers, advocates, researchers, and others. Data collection is now far more complex than HTTP cookies, and the information available to websites can include a user’s name, contact details, sensitive personal information, and even real-time location. At present there are few restrictions on and scant transparency in Web information practices. There is a growing chasm between what society needs to know about Web tracking and what the privacy measurement community has been able to bring to light.

A number of practitioners, researchers, and advocates have begun to more formally study how websites collect, use, and share information about their users. The goal of the Conference on Web Privacy Measurement (WPM) is to advance the state of the art and foster a community on how to detect, quantify, and analyze Web information vectors across the desktop and mobile landscapes. Such vectors include browser tracking, such as cookies, flash cookies, the geolocation API, microphone API, and camera API; and server-side tracking, such as browser fingerprinting. We are also interested in the deployment of privacy-preserving technologies, such as HTTPS and proper deployment of P3P.

I served on the programming committee for this event, and led a discussion about tools for web privacy measurement.