Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Gerard Gjonej

Ying Li

Teresa Mah

Adam Back

Jonathan Wilkins

Valeri Liborski

Lee-Ming Zen

Various embodiments pertain to techniques for measuring a user's privacy level as a user interacts with various web services. In various embodiments, entities with which the user interacts are detected and sensitive information shared by the user is logged to determine what a given entity knows about the user. In some embodiments, sensitive information that is shared by a user can be processed using a predictive algorithm to ascertain a user's level of privacy. When a user's identity is predicted by the algorithm, a user can be alerted to the loss of anonymity. In various embodiments, user-defined areas of anonymity can be used to measure a user's definition of privacy. In some embodiments, alerts can also be provided to the user when a new, previously undisclosed, piece of information is shared by the user.

Monitoring and managing user privacy levels

Systems, methods, and computer storage media having computer-executable instructions embodied thereon that utilize images to generate identifiers of entities and to determine various relationships between entities and web pages are described. A collection of class images that represent various people and non-people entities deemed relevant for tracking user behavior is generated. Given a class image that represents an entity, an image identifier comprising unique feature vectors for that class image is generated. Given an arbitrary web page, all the images embedded on the web page are analyzed. Each embedded image is compared to the image identifiers of the collection of class images to determine whether or not any entities of interest appear in the embedded images of the web page. If relevant entities do appear on the web page, various associations can be made between the entities found on the page, and between the uniform resource locator (URL) of the web page where the entities appear.

Utilizing images as online identifiers to link behaviors together

Detecting an attack on an authentication service. A first memory area is configured to store data relating to a plurality of requests communicated to an authentication service from a plurality of user agents. A second memory area is configured to store a predefined pattern of one or more requests. The predefined pattern characterizes an attack. A processor searches the stored data as a function of a query variable to identify at least one of the plurality of the requests communicated from at least one of the plurality of the user agents and compares the stored data associated with each of the identified requests with the predefined pattern to determine whether the identified request indicates the attack characterized by the predefined pattern. Other aspects of the invention are directed to computer-readable media for use with detecting the attack on the authentication service.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

Gerard Gjonej