Serge Egelman is the research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), an independent research institute affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, where he also holds an appointment in the electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) department. He is also chief technical officer (CTO) and co-founder of AppCensus Inc., a startup that performs on-demand privacy analysis of mobile apps for developers, regulators and watchdog groups.
Egelman conducts research to help people make more informed online privacy and security decisions, and is generally interested in consumer protection. This has included improvements to web browser security warnings, authentication on social networking websites and, most recently, privacy on mobile devices. Seven of his research publications have received awards at the ACM CHI conference, the top venue for human-computer interaction research; his research on privacy on mobile platforms has received the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the USENIX Security Distinguished Paper Award, and both the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) Best Paper and Impact Awards. It has also been cited in numerous lawsuits and regulatory actions, and featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Wired, CNET, NBC and CBS.
He has testified before the U.S. Senate about his research on children’s privacy and his advice has been repeatedly solicited with regard to privacy legislation before both the Senate and House. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. Egelman has previously performed research at Xerox Parc, Microsoft and NIST.
Research interests: privacy, human-computer interaction, security, usability, consumer protection.