Hieu Le

I am currently serving as a Senior Technical Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Technology, where I leverage my expertise on privacy, automated systems, and applied machine learning to further the agency’s mission to protect consumers and promote fair competition.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within Roya Ensafi’s Censored Planet Lab in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) School at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I collaborated on projects that examined the impact of geoblocking on citizens in sanctioned states as well as the development of machine learning and outlier detection methodologies to identify censorship events and content.

I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at UC Irvine and was advised by Athina Markopoulou and part of the ProperData NSF Frontier project. My doctoral studies centers on privacy and networking to improve the (1) transparency of data collection practices of different platforms such as the web, smart TVs and Oculus VR; and the (2) control of data collection by designing frameworks and methodologies to automate the pain-points of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that block advertising and tracking on the web.

For more information, see my CV.

Recent News:

• Present: I am serving as Senior Technical Advisor at the FTC’s Office of Technology.
• Aug. 2024: I completed my Postdoc with Prof. Ensafi at the University of Michigan.
• Aug. 2024: I attended USENIX Security 2024, where our paper “Digital Discrimination of Users in Sanctioned States: The Case of the Cuba Embargo” won Distinguished Paper Award! Congrats to all co-authors!
• Feb. 2024: I guest lectured on “Filtering the Online Experience: The Role of Filter Rules in Online Privacy”, hosted by Umar Iqbal at Washington University in St. Louis.
• Jan. 2024: I gave a talk on “Automating Filter Rule Creation with Minimal Visual Breakage” to the Privacy Engineering Team at DuckDuckGo. Hosted by Anastasia Shuba.