Today's Privacy Challenges
INFO-I 400 / 590
Tuesday Thursday 4:00pm - 5:15pm
Info East 122
Course Description
In this class students will learn about how privacy infringing technologies work and how to design solutions that empower people to manage their privacy. In our interconnected world we are continuously leaking data to anyone who knows how to listen for it. Malls now track the movement of patrons through the WIFI signals on their phones. Online advertisers track people's movements across the web to provide more meaningful advertisements.
In this class students will gain an understanding of how privacy infringing technologies work, what they can do, and what the cannot do. Students will spend part of the course doing hands-on experimentation with privacy infringing technologies to better understand how they work. We will then shift to discussing how to design solutions that address these types of issues through technological, policy, and educational means.
Class Calendar
Date | Topic | Assignment |
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Aug. 26 | Defining Privacy | |
Aug. 28 | User studies, an overview |
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Sept. 2 | Targeted Advertising | |
Sept. 4 |
Targeting advertising and consumers Homework 1 due |
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Sept. 9 | The Internet: an overview |
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Sept. 11 | Cookies Homework 2 due |
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Sept. 16 | NSA Surveillance |
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Sept. 18 | NSA phone tracking Homework 3 due |
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Sept. 23 | Guest speaker Uri Rosenthal |
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Sept. 25 | Affinity Diagrams Homework 4 due |
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Sept. 30 | Educating about Security |
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Oct. 2 | Do not track Homework 5 due |
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Oct. 7 | Social Networking Guest speaker: Emilio Ferrara |
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Oct. 9 | Ethics Guest speaker: Matt Francisco |
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Oct. 14 | Privacy controls in social media |
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Oct. 16 | Android permissions |
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Oct. 21 | Prototyping and design |
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Oct. 23 | In-Class Focus Groups |
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Oct. 28 | SSL and User Opinions |
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Oct. 30 | Heuristics and Priming |
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Nov. 4 | Think Aloud |
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Nov. 6 | Human in the Loop |
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Nov. 11 | Is ignoring security rational? |
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Nov. 13 | Usable and invisible privacy protections |
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Nov. 18 | Privacy in the cloud | |
Nov. 20 | Mobile Privacy | |
Nov. 25 | Thanksgiving Break | |
Nov. 27 | Thanksgiving Break | |
Dec. 2 | Network meta data |
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Dec. 4 | How to do a presentation | |
Dec. 9 | Final Presentation | |
Dec. 11 | Final Presentations |
Grading
Homework | 30% |
News Presentation | 10% |
Participation | 20% |
Final Project | 40% |
Homework
Homework assignments for this class will include reading summaries and hands-on assignments. All homework is due at the beginning of class Thursday. Late homework is not accepted and the lowest homework grade will be dropped. Students are expected to do reading assignments prior to class so they can participate fully in class assignments. Students must submit a short summary of each reading (3-7 sentences) and at least one observation. The observation can be anything you found interesting about the article, something it made you think about, or a question that it raised.News Presentations
Each student will do a short presentation on a current privacy related news story and lead a 5-10 minute discussion on the topic. The presentation should be short and answer the following questions:- What happened?
- What privacy implications does this event have?
- What are the differing views on this event?
- The Wall Street Journal's What they know new section
- Privacy Perspectives
- ArsTechnica's Security news section
- My @kaniea twitter feed and my list of privacy people on twitter.
Projects
Students will work on semester projects in groups of two. Project ideas will be class topic in early October, so students should be thinking about what projects would be interesting to them. Students will be required to do a 10-15 minute presentation the last week of classes. They must also create a paper or create a poster which gives an overview of their project (done as a group) and what they learned while working on the project (done as an individual).
Schedule
- Oct. 10th - Pick a topic, group, and try and explain your topic to someone
- Oct. 16th - Project proposal due (1 page)
- Oct. 23rd - In class focus groups
- Nov. 6th - Think aloud
- Nov. 20th - User task
- Dec. 9th and 11th - Final presentations
- Dec. 12th - Final paper