Byers and Collaborators Identify Significant Yelp.com Privacy Breach
Working with colleagues Michael Mitzenmacher and Giorgos Zervas at Harvard, Hariri Institute member and BU Computer Science professor John Byers identified a large-scale privacy vulnerability at Yelp.com that was leaking private records of Yelp subscribers to users of their mobile site, m.yelp.com. According to Professor Byers, “millions of user records were vulnerable and may have been exposed”. Yelp’s disclosure of the breach appeared on November 1, 2011.