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Alissa Cooper
Chief Computer Scientist
Consumer Privacy

Alissa Cooper is the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Her work focuses on a range of issues including consumer privacy, network neutrality, and technical standards. She conducts research into the inner workings of common and emerging Internet technologies, and seeks to explain complex technical concepts in understandable terms. She has testified before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and writes regularly on a variety of technology policy topics. She currently co-chairs the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Alissa moved to the Washington area after completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University. There her work focused on computer security issues and their policy implications.

Publications:

Alissa Cooper is the Chief Computer Scientist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Her work focuses on a range of issues including consumer privacy, network neutrality, and technical standards. She conducts research into the inner workings of common and emerging Internet technologies, and seeks to explain complex technical concepts in understandable terms. She has testified before Congress and the Federal Trade Commission and writes regularly on a variety of technology policy topics. She currently co-chairs the Geographic Location/Privacy working group (Geopriv) within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Alissa moved to the Washington area after completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University. There her work focused on computer security issues and their policy implications.

Publications:

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Blog Post - A True Test for the Location-Enabled Web
3/11/2010 Consumer Privacy

In advance of Facebook’s annual developer conference next month, reports have begun to materialize about a seminal new feature that the social networking service may roll out: location sharing. Although there’s no official word from the company yet, the speculation is that Facebook will be introducing features that allow users to share their current location with their friends and allow applications developers to offer location-based services to Facebook users.

If the rumors are true, this will no doubt represent a watershed moment for the nascent location-enabled Web. With hundreds of millions of users who log on each day, the potential for a dramatic increase in the amount of location information shared online is sweeping. Because so many Facebook users access the site from mobile devices like smartphones and laptops that can be automatically located based on wireless signals or GPS, it’s not hard to imagine location data quickly and automatically populating news feeds, wall posts, and posted photos.

How Facebook decides to incorporate privacy protections into its new location features will have an obvious impact on whether the Facebook user community embraces location-sharing. Unfortunately, the story of location privacy on the Web thus far hasn’t quite been a fairytale.

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Blog Post - Domo Arigato, IETF
11/23/2009 Internet Openness & Standards

Two weeks ago, upwards of 1100 dedicated souls gathered in Hiroshima, Japan for the 76th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Although I’ve been regularly attending these meetings for some time now, whenever this group gathers I’m always surprised and delighted anew at the extent to which the goal of the IETF – “to make the Internet work better” – remains so intensely in focus for so many engineers, developers, and standards professionals around the world. All of us as Internet users owe much of our satisfaction with the way the Internet functions to the hard work of this all-volunteer group.

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Paper - GEOPRIV: Creating Building Blocks for Managing Location Privacy on the Internet
9/1/2009 Consumer Privacy

Technical standards bodies that reuse the IETF’s work sometimes describe its method as creating reusable building blocks rather than whole-system architectures that are carefully tailored to specific environments. That approach has long reflected the variety of environments in which IETF protocols are required to operate. The real utility of a building block tends to surface only after reuse starts to snowball. HTTP provides an obvious example, since it’s been transporting much more than hypertext for a decade, and its success has spurred a generation of protocol designers who have reused the most portable elements of its design.

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Blog Post - Both Hands in the Cookie Jar
8/17/2009 Consumer Privacy

The federal government has recently announced its intention to revise the current policy governing how federal agency web sites use cookies and other tracking technologies on the web. This is a really significant development for those interested in technology, open government, and privacy, because it has the potential to change the way that federal agencies interact with citizens online. It's so important that we'd like to demystify some of the rumors floating around out there about the current policy, the new policy, and what it all means for privacy.

First things first: the government already has a policy governing how federal web sites can use cookies and other persistent tracking technologies. As established in 2000 (and updated in 2003 -- see our previous post for a brief history), the policy prohibits federal agencies from using persistent tracking technologies unless there's a compelling need, that usage is disclosed, and the agency head (or a delegate) personally approves that use. While that last provision about agency head approval may have stymied many agencies' efforts to use cookies, that doesn't mean there is currently an outright ban on cookie use. There isn't. Today, if an agency head wanted to approve the use of cookies to track and record intimate details about how citizens engage with the agency's site, the current policy would not stand in the way.
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And in fact, that's one of the main reasons why we think the cookie policy needs to be revisited.

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