Stanford’s Workshop on Internet Tracking, Advertising and Privacy last year was attended by executives from big valley tech companies, important privacy researchers and high-ranking government regulators. But one of the most influential people in the room was a graduate student in his mid-20s.
During a break at the “WiTap” conference, that student, Jonathan Mayer, flipped open his laptop to demonstrate his new privacy research. A knot of people gathered, including Edward Felten, chief technologist of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the privacy and antitrust watchdog over powerful companies like Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), Facebook and Microsoft.
“Jonathan has done a lot of important research on understanding and measuring privacy practices,” Felten said in a recent interview. “That certainly has had an impact on the public policy discussions” about Internet privacy.
Few graduate students have their research invoked by members of Congress and praised by key Washington regulators, mentioned on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and pecked at by hostile industry lobbyists, one of whom pooh-poohed Mayer’s research during a congressional hearing in October, saying: “I don’t want to even call it a study. It was the musings of a graduate student.”
Fewer still are pursing a law degree and a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford — at the same time. Stanford officials say they are unsure when another student has followed that track.
“I don’t sleep a lot,” Mayer, now 25, said in a recent conversation in his office in the Gates Computer Science Building, during a break in studying First Amendment protections for his second-year law exams. “I find the context-switching (between law and computer science) the hardest part of the whole thing.”
But the groundbreaking research Mayer has led at Stanford about computer science and privacy has begun to pull away the veil on how the online advertising industry collects data about hundreds of millions of Internet users.
“Historically, the missing piece has been the inability to figure out what companies were doing on the back end” of the Internet, said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “The researchers and the advocates and the regulators have had to rely on the company itself to describe its practices. What Jonathan’s platform has enabled, in collaboration with the (Stanford Computer) Security Lab, has been the ability to actually see what websites are really doing.”
In California, Mayer was a technical adviser for the office of Attorney General Kamala Harris, leading up to a groundbreaking privacy deal in February with Apple, Google and the four other largest mobile Web providers that will change how millions of consumers download smartphone apps.
“His technical expertise was tremendously valuable to us,” said Travis LeBlanc, special assistant attorney general.
Mayer’s research most recently led to investigations by the FTC and state attorneys general in New York, Maryland and Connecticut, into Google’s bypassing of the default privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser, meaning that millions of iPhone and iPad users that Google had said were not being tracked by its advertising network, in fact were having their Web data logged. Google said the tracking was inadvertent, and has stopped it.
Despite what industry lobbyists might say about his “student musings,” Mayer clearly has admirers at the powerful FTC in addition to Felten, who was Mayer’s faculty adviser as an undergraduate at Princeton.
Mayer has done “absolutely terrific work,” FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz said during a recent talk.
Sitting in his office at Stanford, decorated with the flags of his office mates from Hong Kong and New Zealand, and his hometown of Chicago, Mayer looked more like a typical graduate student than someone in a position to challenge the foundations of powerful companies like Google. His office is just one floor up from the room where Larry Page and Sergey Brin, then Stanford computer science Ph.D. students like Mayer, built an early version in the 1990s of what became the Google search engine.
After his discovery on Safari, “I think it’s quite possible that I’ll never have a job at Google,” Mayer said. “But one of the perks of being a graduate student is that there is some latitude from the institution to pursue what is right, and I feel like there are enough doors open that I would never need to worry about that.”
Mayer said having his work denigrated in Congress doesn’t bug him: Growing up with two older sisters gave him a thick skin, he said. Neither of his parents were computer scientists, but Mayer was drawn to computers at an early age, writing his first software code in fourth or fifth grade.
At Princeton, “what was really unusual about Jonathan was that he was so strong both as a public policy student and as a computer science student,” Felten said. “He was one of the best computer science students in his graduating class at Princeton (in 2009). But he was not a computer science major; he was a public policy major.”
At Stanford, Mayer doesn’t emphasize to either the law school or computer science communities that his feet aren’t firmly planted in either camp. In the computer science lab, “they kind of notice I’m an odd duck,” he said.
Mayer sees a future, perhaps in academia or perhaps in Washington, oriented around the intersection of technology and law. That would support his strong feelings about the rights people have to understand what companies and other powerful institutions know about them.
“The work I do here is the work I would do if no money were available to do it,” he said. “It’s the work you choose to do because it’s what you want to do.”
Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories, Facebook and view his Google+ profile.
