Last November, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a landmark privacy rule governing how Internet service providers (ISPs) could collect and share customer data. On April 4, 2017, President Trump signed a joint resolution that repealed this rule before it could ever take effect.

 

This panel will discuss how we arrived at this juncture and how the Internet privacy landscape may evolve in light of these developments. We will also explore the roles (and shortcomings) of both policy and technical mechanisms in protecting user privacy on the Internet.

 

 

Jennifer L. Rexford is the Gordon Y.S. Wu Professor of Computer Science and the chair for the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Jen, who came to Princeton in 2005 after eight and a half years at AT&T Research, is interested in Internet policy and Internet governance, stemming from her longstanding research on computer networks. She co-chairs the Secure BGP Deployment working group of the FCC’s Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council, and chairs the Mobile Broadband working group of the FCC’s Open Internet Advisory Committee. Collaborating with a multi-institution group of colleagues, she has published papers on “Risking communications security: Potential hazards of the Protect America Act” (IEEE Security and Privacy) and “Can it really work? Problems with Extending EINSTEIN 3 to critical infrastructure” (Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal).

 

Panelists:

 

Nick Feamster is the deputy director of CITP and a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, he was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. in Computer science from MIT in 2005, and his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2000 and 2001, respectively. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Technology Review “TR35” award, a Sloan Fellowship, and the SIGCOMM Rising Star Award for his contributions to cybersecurity, notably spam filtering. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, with a focus on network operations, network security, and censorship-resistant communication systems. His research interests overlap with technology policy in the areas of censorship, broadband access networks, and network security and privacy.

 

Edward W. Felten is the director of CITP, the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, and the director of the Program in Technology and Society, Information Technology track at Princeton University. He served at the White House as the Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer from June 2015 to January 2017. Ed was also the first chief technologist for the Federal Trade Commission from January 2011 until September 2012. His research interests include computer security and privacy, and public policy issues relating to information technology. Specific topics include software security, Internet security, electronic voting, cybersecurity policy, technology for government transparency, network neutrality and Internet policy.

 

Ed often blogs about technology and policy at Freedom to Tinker.

 

Arvind Narayanan is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. He leads the Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project to uncover how companies collect and use our personal information. Narayanan also leads a research team investigating the security, anonymity, and stability of cryptocurrencies as well as novel applications of blockchains. He co-created a Massive Open Online Course as well as a textbook on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies. His doctoral research showed the fundamental limits of de-identification, for which he received the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Award.

 

Narayanan is an affiliated faculty member at the CITP and an affiliate scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. You can follow him on Twitter at @random_walker.

 

Joel Reidenberg is a professor at Fordham Law School where he is a leading international scholar in internet law, privacy, and cybersecurity. Reidenberg was CITP’s inaugural Microsoft Visiting Professor of Information Technology Policy for 2013-2014 and a visiting research collaborator from 2014 to 2016. While visiting CITP, he collaborated on research with the CITP community and taught an undergraduate course on internet law and policy, which he still teaches every spring for the Woodrow Wilson School. At Fordham he holds the Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair, and he is the Founding Academic Director of the Center on Law and Information Policy. He received his A.B. from Dartmouth, J.D. from Columbia and Ph.D. from the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne.