Date Posted: 8/18/2015

Ari Juels, Mor Naaman, and Vitaly Shmatikov have received an Expedition Lead Grant from Google's "Open Web of Things" program.  Describing the effort, Juels writes, "we believe a key threat is underexplored: the correlation between dissimilar data sources, such as physical sensors and social media. We call this threat parallax privacy infringement. The term “parallax” denotes the displacement of an object when seen from two vantage points, which reveals distance and depth. Similarly, the vantage points afforded by disparate data streams can reveal a great deal about users. Our role in the expedition program will be to explore the implications to user privacy."

The mission of Google's program is to "enable effective use and broad adoption of the Internet of Things by making it as easy to discover and interact with connected devices as it is to find and use information on the open web"; grants were awarded to CMU, Cornell Tech, Illinois and Stanford.