Towards better ad and tracker blocking on the web

Speaker

Sandra Siby
Assistant Professor, Computer Engineering, NYU Abu Dhabi.

Title

"Towards better ad and tracker blocking on the web"

Abstract

The pervasive nature of the online advertising and tracking ecosystem raises privacy concerns and impacts user experience. Current countermeasures, such as ad-blocker extensions or in-browser privacy tools, often rely on manually curated filter lists which suffer from scalability and accuracy issues. In this talk, I will present some of our work in developing automated tools to assist in ad/tracker detection and blocking. I will discuss the challenges and possible solutions for building detectors that can not only keep up with constantly evolving tracker behaviors but also cause minimal disruption to user experience.

About Speaker

Sandra Siby is an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi. Her research goal is to provide individuals with better control over their privacy and protection from digital threats. Prior to joining NYU Abu Dhabi, she was a postdoc at Imperial College London. She received her Ph.D. from EPFL, her M.S. from ETH Zurich, and her B.Eng from the National University of Singapore. Her current areas of focus are security and privacy mechanisms for the web/IoT/other emerging technologies, and the deployment of trusted and private machine learning on edge devices.