Data-Driven Privacy and Security

3 units

It is becoming increasingly hard for users to use the internet while keeping their privacy and security intact. It is a routine practice for online services to surreptitiously collect excessive amounts of user data, use user data for undisclosed purposes, and even engage in blatant trading of user data. This research-oriented course takes a deep-dive into surfacing data collection by online services and its harms to users, exploring solutions that aim to mitigate these harms, investigating emerging threats that still need to be addressed, and reviewing new directions to systematically improve the state of user privacy and security on the internet. Major topics: Web privacy and security, IoT privacy and security, Large language model (LLM) security and privacy, and Technology policy.