Timothy Libert
Short Biography
(Dr.) Timothy Libert is founder and CEO of webXray LLC.
Prior to founding webXray LLC, he was a Staff Privacy Engineer at Google where he wrote and enforced the internal cookies and web storage policy, designed Google-scale cookie compliance architectures, and developed internal privacy trainings.
Prior to Google, a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's Privacy Engineering graduate program, and a researcher at CMU's CyLab. During this time, he consulted extensively with national- and state-level privacy regulators and civil litigants on high-profile data protections actions in the United States and abroad.
Dr. Libert is a recognized leader in privacy governance with hundreds of articles written about his research in major news outlets around the world, as well as interviews with major radio and television programs such as All Things Considered and Good Morning America. He has written editorials in The New York Times, The Guardian, and STAT. He has published research manuscripts in high-profile venues in medicine, social science, computer science, and information science. His open-source software webXray has been used in major privacy investigations and compliance tasks.
A Photograph of Me
Current professional title:
- The Big Cheese, webXray LLC
Former professional titles:
- Staff Privacy Engineer, Cookie Privacy Policy Lead, Google, 2021-2023
- Special Faculty, Privacy Engineering, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University.
- Core Faculty, CyLab Security and Privacy Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.
- Co-Founder and Chief Technologist, webXray.
- Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Oxford.
- Doctoral Research Fellow, University of Pennsylvania.
- Research Fellow, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.
- Research Fellow, Center for Media, Data, and Society, Central European University.
Education:
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania, 2017.
- Master of Arts, University of Pennsylvania, 2014.
- Bachelor of Arts, New York University, 2004.
How to contact me:
- If you really need to, I'm sure you can find a way.
The following are courses I taught or co-taught:
- Current Topics in Privacy
- Engineering Privacy in Software
- Privacy by Design
- Privacy Policy, Law, and Technology
- Information Technology Policy: Evidence, Communication, & Advocacy
The following are research manuscripts I wrote or co-wrote:
- Preserving Needles in the Haystack: A search engine and multi-jurisdictional forensic documentation system for privacy violations on the web, Libert et al 2021.
- Prevalence of Third-Party Tracking on COVID-19– Related Web Pages, McCoy et al, Journal of the American Medical Association, 2020.
- Good News for People Who Love Bad News: Centralization, Privacy, and Transparency on US News Sites, Timothy Libert, Reuben Binns, ACM Conference on Web Science, 2019.
- Tracking sex: The implications of widespread sexual data leakage and tracking on porn websites Elena Maris, Timothy Libert, Jennifer Henrichsen, Preprint, 2019.
- An Automated Approach to Auditing Disclosure of Third-Party Data Collection in Website Privacy Policies, Timothy Libert, The Web Conference (WWW2018), 2018. Best Paper Nominee.
- Third Party Tracking in the Mobile Ecosystem, Reuben Binns, Ulrik Lyngs, Max Van Kleek, Jun Zhao, Timothy Libert, Nigel Shadbolt, ACM Conference on Web Science, 2018. Best Paper.
- Track the Planet: A Web-Scale Analysis of How Online Behavioral Advertising Violates Social Norms (Dissertation), Timothy Libert, 2017.
- Privacy Implications of Health Information Seeking on the Web, Timothy Libert, Communications of the ACM, 2015.
- What web browsing reveals about your health, Timothy Libert, David Grande, David Asch, The British Medical Journal (BMJ), 2015.
- Exposing the Hidden Web: Third-Party HTTP Requests On One Million Websites, Timothy Libert, International Journal of Communication, 2015.
- Most research data is available on request, please see my curriculum vitæ for papers in review and revision.
The following are software tools I have released open-souce:
The following are white papers I wrote, co-wrote, or contributed to:
- Changes in Third-Party Content on European News Websites after GDPR, Timothy Libert, Lucas Graves, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, 2018.
- Third-Party Web Content on EU News Sites: Potential Challenges and Paths to Privacy Improvement, Timothy Libert and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford, 2018.
- Data and Discrimination: Collected Essays, Various Authors, Open Technology Institute / New America Foundation, 2014
The following are editorial pieces I wrote or co-wrote:
- Online privacy loss: another Covid-19 aftershock, McCoy et al, 2020.
- This Article is Spying on You, The New York Times, 2019
- Google is returning to China? It never really left, The Guardian, 2015.
- Think you’re reading the news for free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy, The Conversation, 2015.