I was invited to present my research to economists, technologists, and policymakers at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in Washington D.C. as part of their 3rd FTC Conference on Marketing and Public Policy. My work demonstrated how lead generation websites act as "consent farms" that embed deceptive patterns to lure consumers into providing their personal and sensitive information to see quotes, but instead, this information is quickly shared/sold to numerous downstream buyers such as agencies and sales teams within minutes of form submission. As a result, consumers are bombarded with relentless telemarketing calls that use unlawful sales tactics. My interactions with the FTC were extremely positive and created valuable opportunity to highlight regulatory and enforcement gaps in this ecosystem, with a focus on reducing consumer harms. These conversations also brought together diverse perspectives and sparked discussions around potential directions for rulemaking.

My research studied how Smart TVs operate Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) Tracking. My findings show that ACR is used to capture screenshots of the user-streamed content as rapidly as every few milliseconds to generate a content fingerprint. Temporally, such fingerprints allow Smart TV manufacturers to understand a user's viewing habits by developing a holistic profile on them. Consumers are often unaware of such tracking and opt-ins are devised easy and implicit, while opt-outs are hidden under complex UI workflows. My work was publicly appraised by the IAB Tech Lab CEO Anthony Katsur. This work (along with my media interviews such as that with The New York Times) was also cited in multiple lawsuits filed in December 2025 by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to describe how ACR works and support technicalities of ACR-based consumer surveillance. These lawsuits sued five major smart TV brands—LG, Samsung, Sony, TCL, Hisense—alleging unlawful spying on Texans via ACR. In January 2026, court issued Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against Samsung prohibiting collection, use, sharing, disclosure, sale, or transfer of ACR data on Texas consumers. In February 2026, Samsung agreed to implement additional clear and conspicuous disclosures and consent screens to explain ACR to users before giving them an option to allow their data to be collected for ACR or not.

My research created awareness regarding dark pooling based ad inventory fraud in the online advertising ecosystem, where genuine ad buyers were deceived into buying ad slots on problematic or brand-unsafe websites, inadvertently fueling problematic content online. In conjunction with CheckMyAds, I sent disclosures to over 100+ fortune 500 brands affected by this fraud, helping them defend against it by closely working with some of them. This work was recognized and appreciated by the IAB Tech Lab's Executive Vice President and Product/Chief Operating Officer Shailley Singh. We were also approached by the U.S. Congresswoman Lori Trahan to provide feedback on her bill to improve transparency in online advertising.