techprogram.html

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layout: default
title: Data Transparency Lab Team
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<section id="introduction" class="section2">
  <h2> Technical Program </h2>
  <div class="divider-line"></div>
  <section class="introduction">
    <p>
      DTL Technical Program is intended to connect the key stakeholders that 
      are part of the Data Transparency Landscape: individuals, researchers, 
      industry players, policy makers, and other stakeholders. 
      Our ultimate target is ensuring the right tools to create awareness are 
      available so that an open and informed conversation around the usage of 
      online personal data can take place.
    </p>
    <br>
    <h4>
      How are those stakeholders connected?
    </h4>
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-md-4" left-aligned>
        <h4>Researchers</h4>
        <div class="column-divider-line"></div>
          Based on their experience and on preliminary studies, formulate 
          hypothesis about how personal data is used. In order to validate them,
          usually concrete data is required. 
      </div>
      <div class="col-md-4" left-aligned>
        <h4>Developers</h4>
        <div class="column-divider-line"></div>
          Create tools that are made available to end-users to 
          satisfy a specific use case or validate a given hypothesis. 
          Developers could be working for companies, research institutes,
          non-profit organisations or open source projects. 
      </div>
      <div class="col-md-4" left-aligned>
        <h4>Users</h4>
        <div class="column-divider-line"></div>
          Tools' users could be individuals but also policy makers, 
          regulators, etc. The tools provide them direct information so 
          immediate awareness is raised. Additionally, the tools can also
          collect Data that let researchers validate hypothesis or discover 
          new findings around data transparency. 
      </div>
    </div>
  </section>
  <section>
    <div class="clear"><div class="divider-line"></div></div>
  </section>
  <!-- DATA SECTION -->
    <h3>Data Sharing</h3>
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-sm-12">
        <div class="introduction left-aligned">
          <p>
          Many of the tools researchers create collect important amounts of data
          (datasets) either directly from real-users, in controlled experiments 
          or via automation/crawling. In any case, those datasets could be 
          useful not only to the tools’ makers but also to many other 
          researchers.
          </p>
          <p>
          DTL provides all the infrastructure and support to foster a healthy 
          Data Sharing ecosystem that enables researchers to publish Datasets 
          so that the entire scientific community could use them to perform 
          additional research work.
          </p>
          <p>
          DTL is going to be extremely careful so that no personal information 
          is contained in any of these datasets and ensuring the right 
          measurements are put in place to avoid the re-identification of users.
          DTL is exploring technologies such as 
          <a href="http://aircloak.com" target="_blank"> Aircloak </a> to expose 
          datasets to researchers in the most anonymous possible way.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>      
    </div>
    <div class="container-fluid topics">
      <h4>Some of those datasets </h4>
      <div class="row">
        <!-- 1 -->
        <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-6 col-lg-6 left-aligned"> 
          <a href="http://recon.meddle.mobi/json/data.json" target="_blank">
            <div class="topic-title">ReCon Dataset - Northeastern University</div>
          </a>
          <p>
            <a href="http://recon.meddle.mobi/index.html">ReCon</a> is a system
            that inspects network traffic to identify personal information
            leaked by mobile apps (to sign up, click <a
            href="http://recon.meddle.mobi/">here</a>). Recon is publishing
            regularly aggregated information about the Personal Information
            Leaks detected: which apps, which type of information and where is
            the information sent to.
            <a href="http://recon.meddle.mobi/json/data.json" target="_blank">
              <i class="fa fa-database fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
            </a>
          </p>
          <p>
            Apart from the Dataset, the Data Transparency Lab has built an API
            on top of it. The API is alpha status so any feedback is very 
            welcome. The <a href="https://github.com/datatransparencylab/recon-api/blob/master/README.md">documentation </a> is available at Github
            as well as some introductory <a href="http://datatransparencylab.github.io/recon-api/">slides</a>.
            This API allow developers to check the number of PI Leaks detected 
            for a specific mobile application or sent to a specific domain.
          </p>
        </div>
        <!-- 2 -->
        <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-6 col-lg-6 left-aligned">
          <a href="https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus/#data" target="_blank">
            <div class="topic-title">Privacy Census - Princeton University</div>
          </a>
          <p>
            One of DTL 2015 Grantees is developing a 1-million-site measurement
            and analysis of tracking techniques. This is the largest and most
            detailed measurement of online tracking to date. It measure
            stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based)
            tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and "cookie
            syncing". Apart from the <a href="#openwpm">source code of the tool</a>
            the data gathered is available as bzipped PostgreSQL dumps and 
            the <a href="https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus/data/schema.sql">
            DB schema is also available </a> 
            <a href="https://webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/webcensus/#data" target="_blank">
              <i class="fa fa-database fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
            </a>
          </p>
        </div>
      <div class="clearfix visible-sm-block"></div>
      </div> 
    <div class="container-fluid">
      <div><i class="fa fa-users fa-2x" style="color:#8BCFD0; vertical-align:middle;"></i>   Interested in sharing data sets with our community? Please <a class="typeform-share link" href="https://rafagrossbrown1.typeform.com/to/hdJ3Oo" data-mode="1" target="_blank">Contact our Tech Program <i class="fa fa-envelope fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i> </a>
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</div>

    </div>
  </section>

  <div class="clear"><div class="divider-line"></div></div>

  <!-- CODE SECTION -->
  <section id="code" class="section2">
    <h3>Source Code</h3>
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-sm-12">
        <div class="introduction left-aligned">
          <p>
            DTL wants to become the reference point for anyone willing to work
            in any project related to Data Transparency. DTL encourages the 
            cooperation and the contributions to any tool that targets providing
            more transparency to how data is used. 
          </p>
          <p>
            DTL will host some projects at the DTL GitHub organisation site but 
            will also work with projects hosted in alternative sites if they 
            are aligned with DTL targets.
          </p>
          <p align=center>
            <a href="https://github.com/datatransparencylab/" target="_blank"> 
              <i class="fa fa-github fa-4x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
              Have a look at the DTL GitHub page!
            </a>
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>      
    </div>
    <div class="container-fluid topics">
      <h4>Some of the projects leveraged by DTL</h4>
      <div class="row">      
        <!-- 1 -->
        <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-6 col-lg-6 left-aligned" id="openwpm"> 
          <a href="https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/" target="_blank">
            <div class="topic-title">OpenWPM</div>
          </a>
          <p>
            OpenWPM is a web privacy measurement framework which makes to easy 
            to collect data for privacy studies on a scale of thousands to 
            millions of site. OpenWPM is built on top of Firefox, with 
            automation provided by Selenium. It includes several hooks for data 
            collection, including a proxy, a Firefox extension, and access to 
            Flash cookies. This open source project is going to be the basis
            for one of the grantees that will develop an easy-to-use tool
            intended to publish a monthly "web privacy census” on tracking and 
            privacy, comprising 1 million sites.
            <a href="https://github.com/citp/OpenWPM/" target="_blank">
              <i class="fa fa-github fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
            </a>
          </p>
        </div>  
        <!-- 2 -->
        <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-6 col-lg-6 left-aligned">
          <a href="https://github.com/yogeshmundada/appu" target="_blank">
            <div class="topic-title">Appu</div>
          </a>
          <p>
            Appu is a Chrome plugin that helps users to keep track of password 
            reuse of across multiple websites. Appu notifies user when a 
            password shouldn’t be used between an important website that might 
            store valuable data and an unimportant website. This open source 
            project is going to be extended by one of DTL 2015 grantees to also 
            detect any other usage of Personal Information during desktop 
            browsing and provide ways to let users "clean up" their privacy 
            footprint.
            <a href="https://github.com/yogeshmundada/appu" target="_blank">
              <i class="fa fa-github fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
            </a>
          </p>
        </div>
        <!-- 3 -->
        <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-6 col-lg-6 left-aligned">
          <a href="https://github.com/Eyasics/recon" target="_blank">
            <div class="topic-title">ReCon</div>
          </a>
          <p>
            ReCon is a Software that analyzes network traffic to identify 
            personal information that is being transmitted. It detects 
            device/user identifiers used in tracking, geolocation leaks, 
            unsafe password transmissions, and personal information such as name,
            address, gender, and relationship status.
            <a href="https://github.com/Eyasics/recon" target="_blank">
              <i class="fa fa-github fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i>
            </a>
          </p>
        </div>
      <div class="clearfix visible-sm-block"></div>
      </div> 
    </div>
  </section>

  <div class="clear"><div class="divider-line"></div></div>

  <section id="tools" class="section2">
    <h3>Tool Curation and Incubation</h3>
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-sm-12 left-aligned">
        <div class="introduction left-aligned">
          <p>
           Many independent developers and research institutes might have very
           good ideas that can be launched as small research projects. However,
           in order to make those projects hit the mass market, they need extra
           support in terms of infrastructure, tooling or technical support. 
           DTL aims to support some of these tools so they can move from 
           small independent projects to commercial grade ones.
          </p>
          <p>
            Additionally, some companies or organisations are already working 
            in many tools to provide more light to how personal data is used. 
            DTL welcomes those tools and is willing to support these companies 
            in order to ensure it reaches as many users as possible and provide 
            them as much value as possible.
          </p>
          <p>
            You can find the tools DTL is promoting at the <a href="tools.html">
              tools </a> section.
          </p>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
        <div class="container-fluid">
      <div><i class="fa fa-users fa-2x" style="color:#8BCFD0; vertical-align:middle;"></i>  Interested in sharing your transparency tool(s) with our community? Please <a class="typeform-share link" href="https://rafagrossbrown1.typeform.com/to/hdJ3Oo" data-mode="1" target="_blank">Contact our Tech Program <i class="fa fa-envelope fa-1x" style="color:#424242;"></i> </a>
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</div>

    </div>
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  </br>
  </section>

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