Facilities for collecting data and metrics are central to both the goals and operations of the Internet today. Given this, it’s interesting that with the exception of ubiquity and operational scaling, the way the world collects data today has not changed much in decades. Mathematical and engineering wizardry has unlocked more opportunities than ever to collect data in ways that improve privacy and mitigate negative impacts, but for the most part we still just collect numbers from system participants and send them over a pipe back to a central clearinghouse. Cookies continue to serve the same central role in systems like advertising attribution that they did twenty years ago.

This talk will provide an overview of the Divvi Up service provided by nonprofit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and the broader context for services like this today. What do the options look like and how can they work together, including DAP, OHTTP, and differential privacy? Why are these things worth pursuing? Why has adoption been relatively slow? What are the challenges and tradeoffs? How might legislation and policy impact the future of these systems?

Bio: 

Josh Aas co-founded and currently runs Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit entity behind Let’s Encrypt, the world’s largest certificate authority helping to secure more than 290 million websites. He also spearheaded ISRG’s latest projects, one focused on bringing memory-safe code to security-sensitive software, called Prossimo, and Divvi Up, a privacy-respecting metrics service. Josh worked in Mozilla’s platform engineering group for many years, improving the Firefox web browser. He also worked for Mozilla in a senior strategy role, helping to find solutions for some of the Web’s most difficult problems. He has deep expertise in software security and ecosystem dynamics, as well as organizational leadership.”

In-person attendance is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students. This talk will be open to the public, at this link, via Zoom. It will be recorded and posted here, on the CITP YouTube channel, and on the Princeton University Media Central channel.

If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at  at least one week before the event.

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