Abubakar Aziz

Abubakar Aziz

PhD Candidate · Northeastern University · Boston, MA

Open to work Email GitHub LinkedIn Scholar

I'm a software engineer and final-year PhD candidate at Northeastern University. I build systems to measure things at internet scale, and use them to study how privacy and AI governance play out in the real world.

My research focuses on web privacy and security, and internet measurement. Lately I've also been getting into AI privacy, security, and governance: how AI systems handle personal data and what it takes to make that auditable. I write about what I find, and I'm actively looking for full-time roles and postdoc positions in software, privacy, or systems engineering.

Projects

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Google Topics API Privacy Audit

WWW 2026

Measured whether Google's Topics API can be abused to infer users' demographics and sensitive interests from browsing history. Found predictive signals in 17 of 19 traits.

PythonMachine LearningWeb Measurement

Third Parties — Web Almanac 2025

HTTP Archive Web Almanac

Co-authored the Third Parties chapter of the 2025 HTTP Archive Web Almanac, analyzing third-party resource usage across millions of websites.

BigQueryData AnalysisWeb Measurement

IAB CCPA Compliance Auditor

PoPETS 2024(4)

Built a crawler to audit CCPA consent compliance across thousands of top websites — found widespread failures in opt-out signal propagation.

PythonJavascriptApache Spark

Google Search Market Share Analysis

★ Best Paper Honourable Mention ICWSM 2024

First large-scale analysis of Google Search's market share under vertical segmentation, using real browsing trace data from a US panel.

PythonApache SparkWeb Measurement

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