About me
I'm a software developer and PhD graduate based in Munich, Germany. I am currently working in the privacy team at DuckDuckGo. I previously worked at Cliqz, developing innovative, user-empowering, and privacy-preserving software in the browser. Specifically, Cliqz' and Ghostery's anti-tracking system, which prevents online tracking of our users. I also participate in the W3C Privacy Community Group, an attempt to standardise tracking protection approaches across browsers.
I am interested in Decentralised and Federated tech, and am a keen self-hoster. I occasionally post things on the posts page.
Experience
Senior Privacy Engineer, DuckDuckGo
2021 onwards
Tech Lead, Cliqz
2015 to 2020
As part of the privacy team at Cliqz I am primarily responsible for Cliqz anti-tracking technology. Highlights include:
- Integration of Cliqz anti-tracking into Ghostery 8.
- Building the data analysis required for the whotracks.me website, and contributing regularly to blogs there about online tracking.
- Development of the data aggregation pipeline behind anti-tracking which deploys data-driven whitelists daily, using Spark and Luigi as core technologies.
- Implementing intelligent anti-tracking on mobile using React-Native as a Javascript runtime. This work enabled parts of the Cliqz browser extension to be run in our mobile apps using the same code base.
- Wrote multiple whitepapers and articles on online tracking and privacy, and spoke at events including PrivacyWeek 2017 and FOSDEM 2020.
Technical Consultant, University College London
March 2015
Short contract to implement a tool for the analysis of AIS shipping data. The resulting tool was open sourced and is now being used for various tasks on the Shipping in Changing Climates project.
PhD, Imperial College London
2010 to 2015
My thesis, entitled “Multi-agent Based Simulation of Self-Governing Knowledge Commons”, investigates the application of self-organising governance, as observed in social systems my political economists, to socio-technical systems which manage of information and knowledge.
Publications
Arjaldo Karaj, Sam Macbeth, Rémi Berson, Josep M. Pujol, “WhoTracks.Me: Shedding light on the opaque world of online tracking,” Arxiv, pdf
Sam Macbeth, “Tracking the Trackers: Analysing the global tracking landscape with GhostRank,” Whitepaper, Cliqz/Ghostery, 2017. pdf
Sam Macbeth, “Tracking and Online Banking: A Survey”, Whitepaper, Cliqz, 2016. pdf
Zhonghao Yu, Sam Macbeth, Konark Modi, Josep M. Pujol, “Tracking the Trackers,” WWW, pp. 121-132, ACM, 2016. pdf
Sam Macbeth, “Multi-agent based simulation of self-governing knowledge commons,” PhD Thesis, 2015. pdf
Sam Macbeth and Jeremy Pitt, “Self-organising management of user-generated data and knowledge,” The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2014. pdf
Sam Macbeth, Didac Busquets, and Jeremy Pitt, “Principled operationalization of social systems using Presage2,” in Modelling and Simulation-Based Systems Engineering Handbook, pp. 43-66, CRC Press, 2014. link
Jeremy Pitt, Didac Busquets, and Sam Macbeth, “Distributive justice for self-organised common-pool resource management,” ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, vol. 9, no. 3, p. 14, 2014. link
Jeremy Pitt, Julia Schaumeier, Didac Busquets, and Sam Macbeth, “Self-organising common-pool resource allocation and canons of distributive justice,” Sixth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organising Systems, pp. 120-128, 2012. pdf
Sam Macbeth, Jeremy Pitt, Julia Schaumeier, and Didac Busquets, “Animation of self-organising resource allocation using Presage2,” Sixth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (Demos), pp. 225-226, 2012. pdf
Jeremy Pitt, Brendan Neville, Sam Macbeth, and Hugo Carr, “Animation of Open Multi-agent Systems,” Proceedings of the 2011 Workshop on Agent-Directed Simulation, pp. 100-107, 2011. pdf