By Andrew Cohen
A buzz-generating paper by Berkeley Law’s Chris Hoofnagle
won the prestigious Multidisciplinary Privacy Research Award at the 2014 Computers,
Privacy & Data Protection (CPDP) conference in Brussels.
Hoofnagle wrote “Behavioral Advertising: The Offer You
Cannot Refuse” with four technical researchers: Ashkan Soltani, Nathan Good,
Dietrich James Wambach, and Mika Ayenson. The developed custom tools and
software to document web-tracking mechanisms, which revealed how advertisers
use obscure technologies to monitor Internet activity—making online tracking virtually
impossible to avoid.
The annual CPDP award honors the best paper written by an interdisciplinary
team of researchers that advances new ideas in privacy and data protection.
“Behavioral Advertising” was selected by a jury of prominent European academics
and representatives from the U.S. and Asia.
“Advertisers are so invested in the idea of a personalized
web that they don’t think consumers are competent to decide to reject it,”
Hoofnagle said. “We argue that policymakers should fully appreciate the idea
that consumer privacy interventions can enable choice, while the alternative, pure
marketplace approaches can deny consumers opportunities to exercise autonomy.
A lecturer in residence at Berkeley Law and the director of information
privacy programs for its Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Hoofnagle is
also a senior fellow at the school’s Samuelson Clinic for Law, Technology &
Public Policy. His research focuses on information privacy, the law of unfair
and deceptive practices, consumer law, and identity theft.
Hoofnagle’s award-winning paper is part of research he began
years ago with Soltani, then a UC Berkeley School of Information graduate
student, and continues today with Good, a School of Information Ph.D.
Tracking
the trackers
In 2009, a team of graduate researchers led by Hoofnagle and
Soltani published a report documenting how advertisers were using persistent
tracking technologies mostly unknown to consumers. The report made major
headlines, and was cited by Congress and by the Federal Trade Commission.
Two years later, Hoofnagle focused on new ways in which online
users were being monitored. His research team was the first to elucidate the
extent to which advertisers used “Flash” technology to track individuals, and they
implemented it to prevent users from blocking tracking.
“In this most recent paper, we document a shift away from
Flash to HTML5, which as a technology has more ability to track users than
standard cookies,” Hoofnagle explained. “Building upon our previous work, we
show that it’s practically impossible for privacy-concerned users to avoid tracking.
This has implications for both theory and the practice of consumer protection
online.”
Hoofnagle said the most gratifying part of the CPDP award is
that his paper was built on research conducted by undergraduates through a
National Science Foundation grant. The grant facilitates a summer initiative,
led by Hoofnagle, which provides graduate school-level mentorship for roughly a
dozen students from colleges without research programs.
“They’re responsible for reading the entire literature of
the field, choosing novel issues to investigate, and executing an experiment—all
in about nine weeks,” Hoofnagle said. “What I learned is that when you give young
people real responsibility and tell them that the project succeeds or fails
based upon their input, they’ll rise to the occasion.”
Hoofnagle also credits UC Berkeley’s Data Science Initiative
for training new students in programming languages and quickly bringing them up
to speed for research.
“Good educational experiences are expensive and
labor intensive,” he said. “Most students nowadays never get individual
instruction. We can’t lose sight of the effectiveness of experiences similar to
the tutorial system. If we want fully developed and resilient students, we have
to invest in in-person supervision.”