Who am I? I’m a Privacy Engineer at Google. My interests and activities lie at the intersection of privacy, security, usability, and compliance where I explore privacy (and data protection) from an engineering perspective including its impact on people’s lives. As a privacy engineer, my efforts are mainly centred around minimising the gap between the legal nature of privacy principles and practical privacy-friendly solutions and artefacts. I also hold a PhD degree in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. I also received my MSc and BSc degrees in Computer Engineering (first class honours) from Azad University (Iran). As a Marie Skłodowska Curie fellow, I spent a few months as a visiting researcher at Vienna University of Economics and Business in Vienna (May and June 17), UNISCON – Sealed Cloud Technology in Munich (Nov 17 – Feb 18), and USECON Experience Design and Consulting in Vienna (Dec 18 and Jan 19). I am also a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM) and Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E).
News:
- March 2022: I joined Google as a Privacy Engineer!
- Feb 2022: Check out my new book recently published by Amazon: ‘‘Information Privacy Management Practice Exam”.
- August 2021 — Check out my new book recently published by Amazon: ‘‘A Collection of Practice Exams on European Data Protection Law”.
- Jan 2021 — Our paper is accepted in Empirical Software Engineering: ”A privacy and security analysis of early-deployed COVID-19 contact tracing Android apps”.
- Sep 2020 — I just started working as a Lecturer at Northumbria University!
- May 2020 — I successfully defended my PhD (summa cum laude) entitled ‘A Multi-Perspective Transparency and Privacy Enhancing Framework for Smartphone Apps’.
- Feb 2020 — Our paper is accepted in IEEE Access : ”Engineering Privacy in Smartphone Apps: A Technical Guideline Catalog for App Developers “.
- July 2019 — I was interviewed by Swedish TV4 regarding my recent findings on the potential privacy threats of famous Android fitness apps.
- June 2019 — Our paper entitled ”ESARA: A Framework for Enterprise Smartphone Apps Risk Assessment” won Best Student Paper Award at 34th International Conference on ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection (IFIP SEC 2019) , Lisbon, Portugal.
- June 2019 — I served as a panelist at Internet Privacy Engineering Workshop (IPEN 2019), Rome, Italy (slides here ).
- May 2019 — I won one of the two competitive Ph.D. Completion Scholarships sponsored by the Goethe Research Academy for Early Career Researchers.
- April 2019 — I received Student Research Paper Award at 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing, Limassol, Cyprus.
- March 2019 — Our paper is accepted in IEEE Security & Privacy: ”Did App Privacy Improve after the GDPR?”.
- Feb 2019 — I received Student Research Competition Travel Stipend sponsored by Microsoft Research.
- Feb 2019 — Our paper is accepted in Computers & Security Journal: ”Revealing the Unrevealed: Mining Smartphone Users Privacy Perception on App Markets”.