Fall 2017: Foundations of Privacy

18-734 / 08-604


Instructors

Professor: Anupam Datta
Office: B23 221, CMU Silicon Valley
Office Hours for SV students: Monday 11am - 12pm, B23 221
Office Hours for Pittsburgh students: Monday 2pm - 3pm, on Google Hangouts (danupam@gmail.com)
Teaching Assistant: Sophia Kovaleva
Cubicle: B19, room 1034, cubicle G, CMU SV
Office Hours for SV students: Wednesday 11am - 12pm, B19 R1034G
Office Hours for Pittsburgh students: Wednesday 2pm - 3pm, on Google Hangouts (details on Piazza)

Course Information

Location: HH 1107, CMU Pittsburgh
Lectures: Monday and Wednesday, 4:30pm - 6:20pm
Recitation: Friday, 12:30pm - 1:20pm
Location: B23 212, CMU Silicon Valley
Lectures: Monday and Wednesday, 1:30pm - 3:20pm
Recitation: Friday, 9:30am - 10:20am

Course Description

Privacy is a significant concern in modern society. Individuals share personal information with many different organizations - healthcare, financial and educational institutions, the census bureau, Web services providers and online social networks - often in electronic form. Privacy violations occur when such personal information is inappropriately collected, shared or used. We will study privacy in a few settings where rigorous definitions and enforcement mechanisms are being developed - statistical disclosure limitation (as may be used by the census bureau in releasing statistics), semantics and logical specification of privacy policies that constrain information flow and use (e.g., by privacy regulations such as the HIPAA Privacy Rule and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), principled audit and accountability mechanisms for enforcing privacy policies, anonymous communication protocols - and other settings in which privacy concerns have prompted much research, such as in social networks, location privacy and Web privacy (in particular, online tracking and targeted advertising).

Prerequisites

An undergraduate course equivalent to 15-251 or permission of instructor.

Schedule

Links

Previous Offerings

Grading

Homework: 60% (lowest score dropped)
Class Participation: 10%
Project: 30%