CIISE - INVITED SPEAKER SEMINAR - Addressing the Address Books’ (Interdependent) Privacy Issues

Date: Wednesday, February 11, 2026, at 11:00 AM 

Location: EV 3.309

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of privacy has evolved, revealing that it is no longer solely within the control of the individual concerned. A particularly noteworthy development is the concept of interdependent privacy—or bystander privacy in the context of ubiquitous technologies—which refers to situations where an individual's privacy is compromised by the use of technology by others. This issue has been explored in various domains, including social networks, location-based services, genomics, and smart homes.
In this talk, I will briefly introduce the topic and then present recent research on the privacy challenges associated with the use of online address books, an area that, surprisingly, has been largely overlooked. Specifically, I will share findings from both legal and user-centered analyses of address book privacy issues. The legal analysis, conducted through the lens of the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union (EU GDPR), consists of a theoretical component examining the roles, rights, and obligations of the different stakeholders, as well as an experimental component involving interactions with service providers. The user-centered analysis focuses on individuals' perceptions of privacy concerns related to address books and on their actual behaviors as users.

This research was published at USENIX Security 2025 (publisher version: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/niksirat ; full version: https://api.unil.ch/iris/server/api/core/bitstreams/71b50daa-bb64-4c4b-99ae-2d83fc16f487/content

Biography

Dr. Kévin Huguenin is a full professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, which he joined in 2016. Prior to that, he held a permanent researcher position at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He also worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL and at McGill University. He was a visiting professor at Concordia University in the Fall of 2023. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rennes and Inria, France, in 2010 and his M.Sc. degree from Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, France, in 2007. His research interests include information security and privacy, with a strong emphasis on the human and social aspects. He is particularly interested in interdisciplinary research projects on privacy, at the frontier between computer science and social sciences (incl. law and psychology) and/or medicine.
https://people.unil.ch/kevinhuguenin/