Eric Zeng
Eric Zeng

About Me

Hello! I am a computer security and privacy researcher, and I study security, privacy, and safety harms that people experience on online platforms.

I am currently a Fritz Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgetown University, where I primarily work with Professor Elissa Redmiles. I am also affiliated with the Massive Data Institute in the McCourt School of Public Policy. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University CyLab, where I was advised by Professor Lujo Bauer. I graduated with a PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington, where I was advised by Professor Franzi Roesner, and I was part of the Security and Privacy Lab.

My current research investigates safety risks from AI-generated images and social media recommendation algorithms. Previously, I have also studied security and privacy risks in online advertising and smart homes. I combine methods and frameworks from computer security, human-computer interaction, psychology, and the social sciences to characterize and quantify the impact of these technologies on users.

I also aim to share my research tools to improve reproducibility and to enable researchers to build on our work. I currently maintain adscraper, a tool for scraping ads from the web, which we used to collect datasets on health-related online advertising, deceptive political ads during the 2020 U.S. elections, and user perceptions of problematic advertising. Tools I've made available from past projects include an in-browser ad measurement tool, proximity-based access controls in smart homes, and a Keybase-powered encrypted email client.

Selected Publications