The Internet is growing rapidly - with its growth, society is also changing, usually towards improvements facilitating daily activities and serving other numerous phenomenal functions. However, because of Internet advancements and conveniences we have all become accustomed to, the privacy aspect of the digital age has gone neglected and the Internet is inundated with our personal information. Every click on the Internet is traceable, whether by the mobile provider, Google, website provider, or data aggregators. This leaves every user vulnerable to potential crime. When considering that location plays an essential part in most crimes, it becomes especially problematic when users post multimedia content that reveals their location, with or without their knowledge, on the Internet. With his team, Dr. Gerald Friedland, Director of the Audio and Multimedia Department at the International Computer Science Institute, is exposing various possible ways to aggregate public and seemingly innocuous information available online to attack the online and offline privacy of Internet users. He is hoping this will create a safer environment on both the Internet and in the physical world.

Users who post photos, videos, and text to public websites often do not realize that personal information from one site can be correlated to information on another site, and that chains of inference can tell much more about them than they are aware they are revealing; their online and offline activities are interconnected. Dr. Friedland and his team are investigating what these inference chains reveal. For example, they have demonstrated how posts on different social media sites can be linked to the same person using geolocation tags (i.e. geotags), timestamps, and/or writing style, even if they are using different usernames and trying to maintain separate personas. By investigating loopholes on the Internet that can be abused for criminal purposes, Dr. Friedland hopes to inform and educate the public and address the problems residing in technical privacy, i.e., solving issues of computer science in collaboration with political, economic, and sociological challenges.

Dr. Friedland’s current research focuses include:

• Privacy in Multimedia: The growing use of social-networking sites like Facebook and YouTube, along with technical advances in data-retrieval techniques, are providing new opportunities to make use of a users personal information — and those opportunities are equally available for both ethical and unethical uses. For example, most people on the Internet don’t understand that videos have so much information that they shouldn’t have - much more than users would like to reveal. Multimedia content often contains more information about other people than the producer intends it to, through background noises, visuals, or contextual artifacts. A user who has uploaded numerous videos on YouTube, for example, will not be guaranteed anonymity on a dating site despite its privacy policy that says it will not release any personal information, falling subject to crimes like stalking - not only in the web space but also in the physical place. Not being careful with your personal information can create vulnerabilities for crimes, where another user takes advantage of the said personal data to promote his or her own agenda. Therefore, Dr. Friedland and his team are investigating the loopholes in the Internet that reveal more data than originally intended, in order to inform netizens on how to make better privacy choices.

• Cybercasing: Coined by Dr. Friedland and his team, the term “cybercasing” - a combination of the word “cyber” and expression “casing the joint” - is now being widely used on the web to refer to the act of using information available online to mount real-world attacks. Due to the rise of the Internet, the information silently released on the web could enable people to commit crimes easily in ways they could not before. One example of cybercasing would be using geolocation data tagged in videos or photos on popular sites like YouTube or Craigslist to determine whether or not a home is occupied with the goal of robbing it. An important distinction to note is that cybercasing is different from merely using online data to commit crimes; committing crimes at a house found on Craigslist would be equivalent to committing crimes using a newspaper advertisement and is something that could be done prior to the Internet, and thus is not considered cybercasing. With the advancement of technology, however, there are many ways to automatically generate a list of unoccupied homes and scope out a place online before carrying out a crime at the exact address, and it is important to distinguish cybercasing so that we know how to address it. A pioneer in exposing cybercasing methods, Dr. Friedland hopes to prevent any crimes thus facilitated by the Internet.

• Teaching Privacy: In order to educate the public in making better privacy choices, Dr. Friedland and his team have created a website at teachingprivacy.org that thoroughly explains the various threats to online and thus offline privacy and how Internet users can make better decisions about their privacy. Also providing educators with very simple and engaging materials that they can use to bring privacy education to their classrooms and partnering with many others, Dr. Friedland is currently changing the high school curriculum as well as undergraduate teaching in universities to reflect that privacy needs to be a normal part of education, so that everyone is well informed at a relatively early stage before the Internet expands any further. There are many implications to protecting privacy, and many different facets of education; increasing individual responsibility on the web to protect each person’s privacy is only one aspect of raising awareness. Often, even if you’re not actively using the Internet, you cannot avoid having a digital footprint by going offline, because you are being tagged in the information your relatives and friends are posting about you. Another element underlying privacy is educating future engineers so that future innovations will take privacy into account and eliminate concerns before they become a problem. For example, the geotag function, designed to organize your photos based on location, has become a problem because it is so accurate, giving away the user’s location with only about 10m difference. If it were to encompass a general region of about 300 ft in radius so that it grabs large blocks of houses instead of an individual room, it would decrease the risk of location exposure while still serving its purpose. Therefore, by educating the general public, Teaching Privacy advises not only how to make good choices for ourselves but also to be mindful of the ones we love.