Protecting Users in the Age of Data-Driven Internet

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Today's Internet is characterized by data-centric ecosystems such as cloud storage services, e-commerce websites, and social networks. Their emergence has led to an immense increase in the amount of personal information that is stored and transferred over the Internet. The first part of my talk will focus on privacy-centered data management in cloud storage services. Over the years, many users have accumulated personal and sensitive data on the cloud. Unfortunately, the scale of the data makes manual management infeasible. I will talk about insights from user studies in this domain and elaborate semi-automated approaches for cloud data management. Next, I will shift the discussion towards my research on commercial virtual private networks (VPNs). Global Internet users increasingly rely on VPNs to preserve their privacy. Due to their lack of technical sophistication, the vast majority of users have limited means to verify a given VPN service's claims. I will discuss my work on investigating the VPN ecosystem and the design of a testing system to evaluate the infrastructural and privacy aspects of these services. I will conclude my talk with directions for future work.