Tech Policy Lab Co-Director Tadayoshi Kohno and Faculty Associate Franziska Roesner were recently honored at the 20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation for the lasting impact of their work on third party tracking.

Kohno and Roesner were part of a team that received the Test of Time Award for their work “Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web,” published in 2012. The research has fueled conversation, influenced the creation of new tools and inspired ongoing research around the topic.

Their efforts have resulted in increased opportunities for users to make choices around how their information is shared. They collaborated with others at the Security and Privacy Research Lab within the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science to develop and then refine ShareMeNot, a browser extension “designed to prevent third-party buttons (such as Facebook’s ‘Like’ or Twitter’s ‘tweet’ button) embedded by sites across the Internet from tracking you until you actually click on them.”

Kohno and Roesner have been recognized for their work together before. The duo received a National Science Foundation award in 2022 to address privacy and security needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations, and were winners of the 2021 Towards Trustworthy Products in AR, VR, and Smart Devices request for proposals launched by Facebook.