Privacy in the Digital Age - CS 5436 / INFO 5303

This course surveys the current state of digital privacy from multiple perspectives, including technology, philosophy, ethics, law, and policy. Privacy poses equally difficult challenges to technologists, policy makers, and ethicists. They must understand what privacy means in their respective domains, as well as the mutual impacts of the domains on one another. The course will review key technologies, including web and mobile tracking, location tracking, privacy engineering, data analytics and differential privacy, facial recognition, and more. It will also introduce students to different approaches to privacy, including technical, empirical, legal, and ethical. When addressing privacy threats in these areas, as well as potential solutions, the course sets out to pair a review of relevant technologies with a review of associated considerations in law and policy, ethics, and social sciences.

 

Textbook: Nissenbaum. "Privacy in Context".

 

Jan 24. Course overview.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Cyphers and Gebhart. "Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Deep Dive Into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance".
• Optional: Christl. "Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life".

Jan 26. Web tracking and online advertising.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Mayer and Mitchell. "Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology".
• Read: Narayanan and Reisman. "The Princeton Web Transparency and Accountability Project".
• Optional: Acar et al. "No Boundaries: Data Exfiltration by Third Parties Embedded on Web Pages".
• Optional: Bashir and Wilson. "Diffusion of User Tracking Data in the Online Advertising Ecosystem".

Jan 31. Cross-device tracking.

• Read: Brookman et al. "Cross-Device Tracking: Measurement and Disclosures".

Feb 2. Ethical and philosophical approaches to privacy.

• Read: PIC Chapters 4 and 5.
• Optional: Gavison. "Privacy and the Limits of Law".
• Optional: Solove. "The Meaning and Value of Privacy".

Feb 7. Privacy harms and privacy puzzles.

• Read: PIC Chapter 6.
• Read: Citron and Solove. "Privacy Harms".

Feb 9. Contextual integrity (part 1).

• Read: PIC Chapter 7.
• Read: Malkin. "Contextual Integrity, Explained".

Feb 14. Mobile tracking and fingerprinting.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Forbrukerrådet. "Out of Control: How Consumers Are Exploited by the Online Advertising Industry".

Feb 16. Location tracking.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Martin and Nissenbaum. "What Is It About Location?".

Feb 21. Privacy policies.

• Read: "Records, Computers and the Rights of Citizens," U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare report: Summary and Recommendations.
• Read: Reidenberg et al. "Ambiguity in Privacy Policies and the Impact of Regulation".
• Optional: Shvartzshnaider et. al. “Going Against the (Appropriate) Flow: A Contextual Integrity Approach to Privacy Policy Analysis”.

Feb 23. Contextual integrity (part 2).

• Read: PIC Chapter 8.
• Read: Regan. "Privacy as a Common Good in the Digital World".

Mar 2. End-2-end secure communications and "going dark".

• Lecture slides
• Read: Abelson et al. "Bugs in our Pockets: The Risks of Client-Side Scanning".

Mar 7. Joseph Turow: What can we learn from large-scale privacy surveys?

• Read: Turow. "The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet", Chapter 1.
• Optional: Draper and Turow. "The Corporate Cultivation of Digital Resignation".

Mar 9. Anonymity networks and censorship resistance.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Dingledine et al. "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router".

Mar 14. U.S. legal landscape.

• Read: Solove and Schwartz. "Privacy Law Fundamentals".
• Optional: Warren and Brandeis. "The Right to Privacy".

Mar 16. U.S. legal landscape (cont'd).

• Read: U.S. Constitution, Fourth Amendment.
• Read: Hecht-Felella. "The Fourth Amendment in the Digital Age", pages 1-11.
• Read: "Applying the Supreme Court’s Carpenter Decision to New Technologies", Brennan Center for Justice.

Mar 21. Elettra Bietti: European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

• Read: Hoofnagle et al. "The European Union General Data Protection Regulation: What It Is And What It Means".
• Optional: Purtova. "The Law of Everything. Broad Concept of Personal Data and Future of EU Data Protection Law".

Mar 23. Data anonymization and re-identification.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Narayanan and Shmatikov. "Myths and Fallacies of 'Personally Identifiable Information' ".
• Read: Ohm. "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization".
• Optional: Narayanan and Shmatikov. "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets".

Mar 28. Introduction to differential privacy.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Garfinkel. "Differential Privacy and the 2020 US Census".
• Optional: Lee. "Why the 2020 Census Has 9 Fake People in a Single House".

Mar 30. Data analytics with differential privacy.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Nissim et al. "Differential Privacy: A Primer for a Non-technical Audience".
• Read (optional for INFO): Erlingsson et al. "RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response".

Apr 11. Face recognition. Privacy of biometrics.

• Lecture slides
• Optional: "How America’s Surveillance Networks Helped the FBI Catch the Capitol Mob" (WaPo).

Apr 13. The threat of "big data".

• Read: Barocas and Nissenbaum. "Big Data's End-run Around Anonymity and Consent".
• Read: Duhigg. "How Companies Learn Your Secrets".
• Optional: Shattuck. "Computer Matching Is a Serious Threat to Individual Rights" vs. Kusserow. "The Government Needs Computer Matching to Root Out Waste and Fraud".

Apr 18. Ero Balsa: Privacy by design.

• Read: Gürses et al. "Engineering Privacy by Design".
• Read: Gürses and del Alamo. "Privacy Engineering: Shaping an Emerging Field of Research and Practice".
• Read: Gürses et al. "Engineering Privacy by Design Reloaded".
• Optional: Hoepman. "Privacy Design Strategies".

Apr 20. Bart Knijnenburg: Usable privacy.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Knijnenburg et al. "Death To The Privacy Calculus?"
• Optional: Feng et al. "A Design Space for Privacy Choices: Towards Meaningful Privacy Control in the Internet of Things".
• Optional: Knijnenburg et al. "User-Tailored Privacy" -- see Chapter 16.

Apr 25. Genomic privacy.

• Lecture slides
• Read: Gymrek et al. "Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference".
• Watch: Nelson. "The Social Life of DNA and the Need for a New Bioethics".
• Optional: Erlich and Narayanan. "Routes For Breaching and Protecting Genetic Privacy".

Apr 27. Eugene Bagdasaryan: Privacy issues in machine learning.

• Read: Shokri et al. "Membership Inference Attacks Against Machine Learning Models".
• Read: Carlini et al. "Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models".

May 2. Secure multi-party computation and private ad attribution.

• Read: Corrigan-Gibbs and Boneh. "Prio: Private, Robust, and Scalable Computation of Aggregate Statistics".
• Read: Taubeneck et al. "Interoperable Private Attribution".

May 4. Chad Brubaker: Privacy design in the real world.

• Read: Exposure Notification: Risks and Mitigations FAQ.

May 9. "Smart home" and IoT privacy.

• Lecture slides
• Optional: Malkin et al. “Privacy Controls for Always-Listening Devices”.