A research paper by Umar Iqbal, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named runner-up for the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
The award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation or deployment of privacy-enhancing technologies. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
Iqbal’s paper, “Tracking, profiling, and ad targeting in the Amazon smart speaker ecosystem,” was first presented at the ACM Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal in October, where it received the best paper award. The paper provided insight into what information is captured by smart speakers; how it is shared with other parties; and how it is used by such parties, allowing consumers to better understand the privacy risks of these devices and the impact of data sharing on people’s online experiences.
After the release of this research, Amazon updated its disclosure to include that it uses smart speaker interaction data to infer user interests for the purposes of ad targeting, which was initially not disclosed.
Originally published on the McKelvey Engineering website
