5 papers
Software-Supported Audits of Decision-Making Systems: Testing Google and Facebook's Political Advertising Policies
J. Nathan Matias, Austin Hounsel, Nick Feamster
How can society understand and hold accountable complex human and algorithmic decision-making systems whose systematic errors are opaque to the public? These systems routinely make…
Identifying Disinformation Websites Using Infrastructure Features
Austin Hounsel, Jordan Holland, Ben Kaiser +3
Platforms have struggled to keep pace with the spread of disinformation. Current responses like user reports, manual analysis, and third-party fact checking are slow and difficult…
Understanding How and Why University Students Use Virtual Private Networks
Agnieszka Dutkowska-Zuk, Austin Hounsel, Andre Xiong +4
We study how and why university students chose and use VPNs, and whether they are aware of the security and privacy risks that VPNs pose. To answer these questions, we conducted 32…
Comparing the Effects of DNS, DoT, and DoH on Web Performance
Austin Hounsel, Kevin Borgolte, Paul Schmitt +2
Nearly every service on the Internet relies on the Domain Name System (DNS), which translates a human-readable name to an IP address before two endpoints can communicate. Today, DN…
Automatically Generating a Large, Culture-Specific Blocklist for China
Austin Hounsel, Prateek Mittal, Nick Feamster
Internet censorship measurements rely on lists of websites to be tested, or "block lists" that are curated by third parties. Unfortunately, many of these lists are not public, and…