COMP SCI 7213OL - Applied Privacy

This course is to introduce students to understand privacy properties, apply privacy practices, and ultimately bring them to up to the frontier of modern privacy techniques that enterprises and governments have adopted. The course tries to prepare students to understand what the risks to human related privacy are and to rethink how to design and build products and systems with privacy and respect for their target users across countries in which they may operate. The course will also introduce the concept of pure provable privacy - differential privacy - and show how it is being put into practice. Differential privacy was initially incepted at Microsoft Research, and the theoretical and technical impact of differential privacy is profound in global industries, which has already been deployed by Google, Apple, Uber, and US Census Bureau. Finally, the course will show ways of achieving differentially private mechanisms through a practical translation and explore the limits of the use of differentially private techniques in synthetic data generation by demonstrating practical attacks that thwart privacy properties.