West Point scholar to discuss web use and privacy issues

Professor Greg Conti of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point will give a lecture titled "Googling, the Instrumented Web, Privacy and You" at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 2, in Harder Hall, room 203.

Admission is free and open to the public.

Every time we use the web, we disclose tremendous amounts of information to ISPs, Internet backbone providers, and online companies. This information is shared and data-mined, but rarely discarded. Email addresses, phone numbers, aggregated search queries, cookies, IP addresses ?any unique feature of our behavior provides a mechanism to link, profile, and identify users, groups, and companies.

From these revelations all aspects of our daily lives emerge, including our activities, locations, and social networks. Making matters worse, ubiquitous advertising networks, dominant online companies, complicit network providers, and popular web analytic services possess the ability to track, and in some cases, eavesdrop on and modify our online communications.

This talk covers all aspects of the issue, including end-user computers, ISPs, online companies, and advertising networks. The long-term implications of web-based information disclosure are profound. Interaction by interaction, we are ceding power to ISPs and online companies, disclosures that may one day alter the course of elections, remove world leaders from power, or cause the outspoken citizen to disappear from the web.

Conti is an assistant professor of computer science at West Point. His research includes security data visualization and web-based information disclosure. He is the author of Security Data Visualization (No Starch Press) and Googling Security: How Much Does Google Know About You? (Addison-Wesley).

Conti's talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science and Honors Forum.