PEPR '25: 2025 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect

Don Marti


The "privacy" offered by "privacy-enhancing technologies" (PETs) on the web is remarkably different from the privacy that users want and expect. People seek out privacy to avoid real-world privacy harms such as fraud and algorithmic discrimination, and PETs, focused on more narrow mathematical goals, can actually make the real privacy problems worse and harder to detect. Can today's PETs be fixed, or should the web move to more productive alternatives?


https://www.usenix.org/conference/pepr25/presentation/marti