PEPR '23
as the organisers put it
The 2023 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR '23) will take place at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in Santa Clara, CA, USA, on September 11–12, 2023.
who it's for
privacy engineers, data engineers, data scientists, security engineers, engineering managers, compliance officers
topics
central differential privacy; differential privacy at scale; per-record differential privacy; private logging pipelines; privacy-preserving telemetry (STAR); Auditable Key Directory key transparency; data access automation and DSARs; private set intersection deployment; cookie infrastructure and browser privacy; content security policy for privacy
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Designing a Private Logging Pipeline | Mekhola Mukherjee, Thomas Vannet | 12m |
Mobile logging faces battery and bandwidth limits and must protect data from billions of users while still enabling debugging and metrics; the pipeline uses… | ||
| Counting with STAR: Shipping a Privacy-Preserving Telemetry System to Millions of Users | Shivan Kaul Sahib | 15m |
Brave builds and ships STAR, a production telemetry pipeline that uses Shamir secret sharing and oblivious PRFs to turn hashed strings into k‑threshold… | ||
| WhatsApp Key Transparency | Kevin Lewi | 13m |
WhatsApp describes a deployed key transparency system using the open-source Auditable Key Directory (AKD), publishing about 50,000 epochs so far and… | ||
| Algorithmic Transparency in Personalized Advertising: Learnings from Building "Why Am I | Xuanting Cai, Rajesh Shenoy, Anuj Gupta | 13m |
Meta rolls out version 3.0 globally in February 2023 and shows concrete engineering choices: a distilled explainable model built from the complex multi-stage… | ||
| Demystifying Access Control in the Modern Data Warehouse | Viraj Thakur | 10m |
Cruise builds an internal tool xray that fetches IAM policies for a BigQuery resource and all parents, identifies roles that include read permission, unrolls… | ||
| How to Break, Then Fix, Differential Privacy on Finite Computers | Damien Desfontaines, Samuel Haney | 16m |
Shows that naive floating-point Laplace implementations leak exact counts via precision-based attacks because some floats are unreachable, letting an adversary… | ||
| Plume: Differential Privacy at Scale | Alex Kulesza | 12m |
Plume is a distributed system for histograms, sums and quantiles that runs on datasets of trillions of records and petabyte scale, using the Gaussian mechanism… | ||
| Communicating Differential Privacy Guarantees to Data Subjects | Priyanka Nanayakkara | 10m |
Compares explanations for differential privacy across two studies: a label format that lists which recipients can see raw data under local vs central… | ||
| Per-Record Privacy and Its Application to Heavy-Tailed Economic Data | William Sexton | 12m |
Claims a new formal guarantee called Per-Record Differential Privacy and demonstrates it by splitting establishments into pieces and applying standard DP with… | ||
| Designing the Pilot Release of Israel's National Registry of Live Births: Reconciling | Shlomi Hod, Ran Canetti | 11m |
Project trains differentially private generative models on the 2014 singleton births registry (about 160k singletons) and outputs a six-column CSV after… | ||
| Bad Metrics and Very Bad Decisions | Lea Kissner | 18m |
Shows that common privacy and risk metrics routinely mislead: a company goal to “send N notifications” is trivially gamed, a time-to-first-response metric… | ||
| Privacy in the Public Sector: Lessons Learned and Strategies for Success | Alan Tang, Anshu Singh | 16m |
GovTech Singapore builds a central privacy toolkit called enCRYPT with modules for tabular anonymization, PII detection, quick synthetic-data generation and… | ||
| Privacy-Preserving Analytics on the Ground | Ryan Steed | 10m |
Grounded-theory analysis of 25 interviews across startups, corporations, nonprofits and government shows three adoption narratives: preserving data-driven ops… | ||
| How to Utilize Your Red Team for Privacy | David Renardy | 16m |
Meta runs a dedicated privacy red team that applies adversarial testing to data flows, using the open‑source Privacy Adversarial Framework and an internal… | ||
| A People-First Approach to Introducing Process and Tools for Technical Privacy Review | Ryan Tenorio | 12m |
Adopts a people-first privacy review that embeds requirements directly into engineering design docs and the Secure Product Life Cycle, handling 1–3 dozen… | ||
| Data Access Automation at Scale | Miró Khalifa | 10m |
Meta deploys an annotation API and schema language that validate ownership, fetchers, fields and edges, then auto-generate privacy-safe accessors and a unified… | ||
| Building a Complete Export Ecosystem—From DSAR Automation to Privacy Center | Pankaj Mohapatra | 11m |
Built an in-house DSAR Automation pipeline that uses Cadence workflows, prebuilt ETL pipelines and Spark on YARN to turn CSV or single-subject requests into… | ||
| Securing and Standardizing Data Rights Requests with a Data Rights Protocol | Ryan Rix, Ginny Fahs, Dazza Greenwood | 20m |
Consumer Reports describes a practical protocol that encodes data-rights requests into signed packets, implemented as five HTTPS endpoints, using libSodium for… | ||
| Towards the Deployment of Secure Computation Tools in Genomics: A Sociotechnical | Natnatee "Ko" Dokmai | 13m |
A secure genotype imputation pipeline called SMac secure genotype imputation runs inside Intel SGX with side-channel mitigations, reproducing state‑of‑the‑art… | ||
| Protecting User Privacy in Private Set Intersection: A Journey Toward Mitigating User | Jian Du, Haohao Qian, Bo Jiang, Yongjun Zhao, Shikun Zhang, Qiang Yan | 18m |
DPCA-PSI implements a redesigned DelPHI-style PSI for multi-ID matching so each key matches independently, turning exponential leakage into linear leakage… | ||
| Privacy for All: Achieving Inclusive Privacy in the Digital Age | Sri Pravallika Maddipati, Norbert Nthala | 15m |
Defines inclusive privacy as designing for specific user contexts (refugees, transgender Ugandans, etc.) and gives a concrete workflow: map relevant diversity… | ||
| Rethinking Data Minimization from a User-Centered Approach: A Paradigm Shift | Tanusree Sharma | 13m |
Study of 30 EU/UK users in the web search context shows concrete gaps: users perceive Google as lacking minimization, they’re often more willing to share data… | ||
| Striking the Balance: Safeguarding Customer Privacy While Empowering Employees | Emily Greene | 12m |
Describes deploying automated data masking and role-based least privilege with break‑glass to minimize human exposure while retaining debugging and analytics… | ||
| Reimagining User Authentication for Digital Health Services: A User-Centered Approach | Bo Kim | 11m |
UX team analyzes thousands of feedback surveys and help desk inquiries and finds login and account creation are the top pain points; EHRs still rely on… | ||
| Cookie Infrastructure at Meta | Katriel Cohn-Gordon | 16m |
Meta enforces cookie behavior with a central cookie schema and a mandatory developer API that only allows reads/writes by inum identifiers so code can’t… | ||
| Looking beyond Prompts for Permissions in Chrome | Serena Chen, Marian Harbach | 16m |
Chrome shows that shrinking prompts into a tiny chip cuts visible grants from about 20% to 1%, so reduced interruption can also remove desired consent. Chrome… | ||
| Using Content Security Policy for Privacy | Devin Lundberg | 10m |
Pinterest uses Content Security Policy to block any network requests to domains not on an allow list, creating a centralized schema in the code repo that gives… | ||
| PrivacyTests.org—Open Source Tests of Web Browser Privacy | Arthur Edelstein | 11m |
PrivacyTests.org runs weekly automated leak tests by launching browsers on a Mac, visiting test pages that simulate trackers, collecting results and publishing… | ||
| Evolution of Privacy Pass at Cloudflare | Thibault Meunier | 15m |
Privacy Pass is now a production authentication layer used to reduce challenges and preserve anonymity: Apple’s Private Relay integration yields 92% fewer… | ||
| Spot the Fed: Mastodon, the Fediverse, and Why You Can't Run Servers Like It's 1999 | Tariq Yusuf | 09m |
Claim: running a Mastodon instance is technically trivial—10–15 minutes to deploy—but operational reality is not. Expect legal exposure from privacy… | ||
| How Does AI Change Privacy? Towards Helping Practitioners Scope, Motivate, and Conduct | Sauvik Das | 11m |
Analysis of a public incident database (>300 cases) finds 93% of 300+ incidents where AI capabilities or requirements create or exacerbate privacy harms… | ||
| Designing for Privacy Needs of Bystanders in Smart Homes: A Systematic Review of | Julia Bernd, Eimaan Saqib, Junghyun Choy, Shijing He, Ruba Abu-Salma, José Such, Mobin Javed | 17m |
A systematic review of 48 papers catalogs concrete design proposals—Bluetooth LE beacons, dashboards and status beacons to broadcast recording state; guest… | ||
| Putting Privacy on the Map | Jayati Dev, Bahman Rashidi, Vaibhav Garg, Nishanth Ganeshsankar, Dinesh Prakash | 16m |
Models of Applied Privacy (MAP) presents a developer‑centric threat modeling framework that turns existing taxonomies into explicit personas and a persona… | ||
| The Missing Link in Privacy Risk Assessments | Jared Maslin | 15m |
Argues a specific gap in privacy risk assessments and offers a three‑prong, persona‑based method that ties data lifecycle phases to user journeys and data… | ||
| Beware, Data Processing! Proposing Categories for Risk Communication Related to the | Lukas Seiling, Rita Gsenger, Filmona Mulugeta, Marte Henningsen, Lena Mischau, Marie Schirmbeck | 14m |
Proposes concrete categories for risk communication grounded in GDPR analysis, a contextual model that nests event→consequence chains inside contexts, and… | ||
| De-identified, Anonymized, or Aggregated? A Look around the Globe | Katharina Koerner | 15m |
Regulatory definitions leave the same dataset legally protected in one jurisdiction and out of scope in another: Recital 26 ambiguity under GDPR splits courts… | ||
| Confirmation Bias in the Privacy Profession: Common Misreading of the NIST Privacy | Nandita Rao Narla, R. Jason Cronk | 10m |
Claims that many users misread the NIST Privacy Framework are supported by a review of about 40 videos and 50 articles and by pointing to concrete confusions… | ||
| Privacy Requirements and Realities of Digital Public Goods | Gika Gopi, Adya Madii, Julia Fanti | ? |
A qualitative review of 101 DPG registry responses finds that evaluation is weak: 50% no supporting documentation, 16% submit security or privacy docs, and… | ||
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