Google's Trail of Crumbs

Matt Stoller published my essay on Google’s decision to abandon its Privacy Sandbox Initiative in his Big newsletter:

Google's Trail of Crumbs by Matt Stoller

Google is too big to get rid of cookies. Even when it wants to protect users, it can't.

Read on Substack

For more technical background on this, see Minjun’s paper: Evaluating Google’s Protected Audience Protocol in PETS 2024.

Google Security and Privacy Workshop

I presented a short talk at a workshop at Google on Adversarial ML: Closing Gaps between Theory and Practice (mostly fun for the movie of me trying to solve Google’s CAPTCHA on the last slide): Getting the actual screencast to fit into the limited time for this talk challenged the limits of my video editing skills. I can say with some confidence, Google does donuts much better than they do cookies!

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Google Federated Privacy 2019: The Dragon in the Room

I’m back from a very interesting Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics that was organized by Peter Kairouz and Brendan McMahan from Google’s federated learning team and was held at Google Seattle. For the first part of my talk, I covered Bargav’s work on evaluating differentially private machine learning, but I reserved the last few minutes of my talk to address the cognitive dissonance I felt being at a Google meeting on privacy.

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