Lorrie Faith Cranor is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS). She is on sabbatical for the 2012-13 academic year. Professor Cranor teaches courses on privacy, usable security, and computers and society. She is also a o-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc. She came to CMU in December 2003 after seven years at AT&T Labs-Research. While at AT&T she also taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Dr. Cranor has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community. She co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O'Reilly 2005), and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also directs an NSF-funded project that is studying the human aspects of phishing attacks and other semantic attacks.
Dr. Cranor has authored over 80 research papers on online privacy, phishing and semantic attacks, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, usable access control, and other topics. She chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002). In 2003 she was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. She was a member of a team of Carnegie Mellon faculty members who received the IBM Privacy Faculty Award. In 2010, she received a Google Focused Research Award for her team's research into whether online companies that have more stringent privacy practices can command premium prices.
Dr. Cranor received her doctorate degree in Engineering & Policy from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. While in graduate school she helped found Crossroads, the ACM Student Magazine, and served as the publication's editor-in-chief for two years.
Dr. Cranor serves on the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board, and the USACM Council. She was chair of the Tenth Conference on Computers Freedom and Privacy (CFP2000) and program committee chair for the 29th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC 2001). In the Spring of 2000 she served on the Federal Trade Commission Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security. She also serves on the editorial boards of the journals ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, The Information Society, and Journal of Privacy Technology.
Dr. Cranor has been studying electronic voting systems since 1994 and in 2000 served on the executive committee of a National Science Foundation sponsored Internet voting taskforce.
Dr. Cranor was also a member of the project team that developed the Publius censorship-resistant publishing system. In February 2001, the Publius team was honored by Index on Censorship magazine for the "Best Circumvention of Censorship."
Degree(s):
B.S. (Engineering and Public Policy) Washington University in St. Louis, 1992
M.S. (Technology and Human Affairs), Washington University in St. Louis, 1993
M.S. (Computer Science), Washington University in St. Louis, 1996
D.Sc. (Engineering and Policy), Washington University in St. Louis, 1996
