Arvind Narayanan is a computer scientist and a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. Narayanan is recognized for his research in the de-anonymization of data.

Biography

Narayanan received technical degrees from the

Indian Institute of Technology Madras Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is a public technical university located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. As one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), it is recognized as an Institute of National Importance and has be ...

in 2004. His advisor was C. Pandu Rangan. Narayanan received his PhD in computer science from the

University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin, UT, or Texas) is a public research university in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 1883 and is the oldest institution in the University of Texas System. With 40,916 undergraduate students, 11,075 ...

in 2009 under Vitaly Shmatikov. He worked briefly as a post-doctoral researcher at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, working closely with

Dan Boneh Dan Boneh (; he, דן בונה) is an Israeli-American professor in applied cryptography and computer security at Stanford University. In 2016, Boneh was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the theory an ...

. Narayanan moved to

as an assistant professor in September 2012. He was promoted to associate professor in 2014, and to professor in 2022.

Career

In 2006

Netflix Netflix, Inc. is an American subscription video on-demand over-the-top streaming service and production company based in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in Scotts Valley, California, it offers a fil ...

began the

Netflix Prize The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users being identified e ...

competition for better recommendation algorithms. In order to facilitate the competition, Netflix released "anonymized" viewership information. However, Narayanan and advisor Vitaly Shmatikov showed possibilities for de-anonymizing this information by linking this anonymized data to publicly available

IMDb IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

user accounts. This research led to higher recognition of de-anonymization techniques and the importance of more rigorous

anonymization Data anonymization is a type of information sanitization whose intent is privacy protection. It is the process of removing personally identifiable information from data sets, so that the people whom the data describe remain anonymous. Overv ...

techniques. Later Narayanan de-anonymized graphs from social networking and writings from blogs. In mid-2010, Narayanan and

Jonathan Mayer Jonathan Mayer (born February 5, 1987) is an American computer scientist and lawyer. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs at Princeton University affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Policy, and was ...

argued in favor of

Do Not Track Do Not Track (DNT) is a formerly official HTTP header field, designed to allow internet users to opt-out of tracking by websites—which includes the collection of data regarding a user's activity across multiple distinct contexts, and the retent ...

HTTP headers The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

. They built prototypes of Do Not Track for clients and servers. Working with

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

they wrote the influential

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

Internet Draft An Internet Draft (I-D) is a document published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) containing preliminary technical specifications, results of networking-related research, or other technical information. Often, Internet Drafts are int ...

of Do Not Track. Narayanan has written extensively about software cultures. He has argued for more substantial teaching of ethics in

computer science education Computer science education or computing education is the art of teaching and learning the discipline of computer science, and computational thinking. As a subdiscipline of pedagogy it also addresses the wider impact of computer science in socie ...

and usable

cryptography Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...

Awards

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

* Privacy Enhancing Technology Award 2008

Biography

Career

Awards

References

External links