This is the personal home page of Timothy Libert on the World Wide Web.

This is from an oddly detailed report card I got in the fifth grade:

It took me a few career changes to seriously pursue my "science investigations", but that's what I do today as a doctoral student and human rights advocate. My science investigations mainly focus on privacy, free expression, computer security, and the intersection of the aforementioned with social movements, business, and law.

Peer Reviewed Academic Work

My first peer-reviewed journal article, "Privacy Implications of Health Information Seeking on the Web (PDF)", is in the March 2015 issue of Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. I made a video explaining the research. If you want the raw data, click here for a 1GB file.

In The BMJ (British Medical Journal), I published a paper on health privacy online with two Penn medicine colleagues, Drs. David Grande and David Asch, titled What web browsing reveals about your health (PDF).

I also wrote another peer-review article in The International Journal of Communication titled Exposing the Hidden Web: Third-Party HTTP Requests On One Million Websites (PDF), which analyzes the presence of tracking mechanisms on the top One Million Alexa websites. You can download the entire set of 35,569,481 third-party request records in this 600MB file.

I have other interesting projects on the way, but they are going through review. Review is slow.

Software

I wrote the software platform webXray for privacy researchers and I also got into the habit of writing screen savers on long bus trips.

Editorial

With Maria Repnikova I wrote an op-ed in The Guardian titled Google is returning to China? It never really left.

With my advisor, Victor Pickard, I wrote a piece for The Conversation titled Think you’re reading the news for free? New research shows you’re likely paying with your privacy.

Press Coverage

I have been interviewed on NPR, Good Morning America, and my research has been featured in numerous publications. Although I am not keeping a complete list, here are a few examples: Vice, Fast Company, The Times of India, San Jose Mercury News, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Fast Company, New York Magazine. I particularly liked it when I was quoted in Wired Italy as saying “la NSA non spiava i singoli, ma le aziende che a loro volta spiavano le persone” as it sounds very cool.

Other Information

For the above information in a more standard format, please download my possibly up-to-date curriculum vitæ.

If you are looking for archived material which is now missing, or would just like to contact me, please use my contact form.

If you would like to tell me secret secrets, you can also find my PGP key here.

Terms of Service

Individuals, academic researchers, and non-profit entities are free to access this site via any means. For-profit entities may not access this site under any circumstances, using any means, including but not limited to programmatic, automatic, or robotic methods. For-profit entities violating these terms may be referred to the United States Department of Justice for prosecution under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Entities feeling this is unfair, or hinders their business practices, are encouraged to spend their significant lobbying budgets advocating for the passage of Aaron's law.