18734 - Foundations of Privacy

Schedule (subject to change)

Classes start September 9th

Date Topic Reading Notes
Wed, Sep 9 Course Overview
Central Questions:
        What is privacy?
        How can we protect privacy?
Slides
Video
Fri, Sep 11 Recitation on Logic. Slides
Mon, Sep 14
Conceptual Framework for understanding Privacy Slides
Video
Privacy through Accountability
Application domains: Healthcare and Web Privacy
Wed, Sep 16 Specifying Privacy Policies:
Contextual Integrity & Logics of Privacy
Case study: HIPAA Privacy Rule
  • Privacy and Contextual Integrity: Framework and Applications [PDF]
  • Experiences in the Logical Specification of the HIPAA and GLBA Privacy Laws [PDF]
Slides
Video
Fri, Sep 18 Recitation on the Reduce tool. Slides
Mon, Sep 21 Privacy Policy Enforcement through Audit
Case study: HIPAA Privacy Rule
  • Policy Auditing over Incomplete Logs: Theory, Implementation and Applications [PDF] [TR]
HW1 out
Slides1 Slides2
Video
Wed, Sep 23 Purpose Restrictions in Privacy Policies: Semantics and Audit
  • Formalizing and Enforcing Purpose Restrictions in Privacy Policies [PDF]
  • Purpose Restrictions on Information Use [PDF]
Slides
Video
Fri, Sep 25 Course Project guidelines, Markov Decision Processes. Slides
Mon, Sep 28 Privacy Compliance in Big Data Systems
  • Bootstrapping Privacy Compliance in Big Data Systems [PDF]
Slides
Video
Wed, Sep 30
Guest Lecture
Privacy in the Internet of Things
by Richard Chow, Intel Corporation
HW2 out
Slides
Fri, Oct 2 Basic Probability Theory. HW1 in (extended)
Slides
Mon, Oct 5 Project Proposals. Video
Wed, Oct 7
Guest Lecture
Machine Learning and Privacy
by Yair Zick, Carnegie Mellon University
Slides
Video
Fri, Oct 9 Recitation on AdFisher, HW1 discussion.
Mon, Oct 12
Guest Lecture
Privacy against Statistical Inference
by Nadia Fawaz, Technicolor Research
  • Privacy against Statistical Inference [PDF]
  • Managing your Private and Public Data: Bringing down Inference Attacks against your Privacy [PDF]
Wed, Oct 14 Information Flow Experiments
  • Automated Experiments on Ad Privacy Settings [PDF]
  • Methodology for Information Flow Experiments [PDF]
  • XRay: Enhancing the Web's Transparency with Differential Correlation [PDF] (Optional)
  • Adscape: Harvesting and Analyzing Online Display Ads [PDF] (Optional)
HW2 in
HW3 out
Slides
Video
Fri, Oct 16 Recitation on distance metrics (useful for differential privacy lecture).
Mon, Oct 19
Online Tracking
  • Third-party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology [PDF]
  • Why Johnny Can't Opt-Out [PDF]
Slides
Video
Privacy-Preserving Statistics
Application Domains: Web privacy (tabular and graph-structured data)
Wed, Oct 21 Big Data Analytics and Values,
Database Privacy: k-anonymity and de-anonymization attacks
  • Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values [PDF]
  • Protecting Respondents' Identities in Microdata Release [PDF]
  • Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset) [PDF]
Slides
Video
Fri, Oct 23 Mid semester break. No recitation.
Mon, Oct 26 Database Privacy: Differential Privacy
  • Differential Privacy [PDF]
  • Optional: No Free Lunch in Data Privacy [PDF]
Slides
Video
Wed, Oct 28 Database Privacy: Differential Privacy Applied
  • Differentially Private Recommender Systems: Building Privacy into the Netflix Prize Contenders [PDF]
HW3 in
HW4 out
Slides
Video
Fri, Oct 30 HW 2 Discussion, Laplace Mechanism. Slides
Mon, Nov 2 Fairness in classification
  • Fairness through Awareness [PDF]
Slides
Video
Wed, Nov 4 Influence in Classification Decisions
  • Influence in Classification via Cooperative Game Theory [PDF]
Slides
Video
Fri, Nov 6 HW 3 Discussion, Recitation on basic Cryptography. Slides
Mon, Nov 9
Project Deliverables I due, Course Project Update Video
Cryptographic Mechanisms for Privacy Protection
Applications: Anonymous communication, identification
Wed, Nov 11 Anonymous Communication Protocols
  • Untraceable Electronic Mail [PDF]
  • The Dining Cryptographers Problem [PDF]
  • TTor: The Second-Generation Onion Router [PDF]
HW4 in
HW5 out
Slides1 Slides2
Video
Fri, Nov 13 No recitation.
Mon, Nov 16
Zero Knowledge: Theory Slides
Video
Wed, Nov 18 Zero Knowledge Applications
  • Untraceable Electronic Cash [PDF]
  • Optional: CL anonymous credentials [PDF]
Slides1 Slides2
Fri, Nov 20
Venue: HH D210
HW 4 discussion, Zero Knowledge Review.
Mon, Nov 23 Secure Two-Party Computation
  • Yao's Garbled Circuits [PDF]
  • Faster Secure Two Party Computation Using Garbled Circuits [Web Page]
Slides1 Slides2 Video
Wed, Nov 25 No Lecture for Thanksgiving
Fri, Nov 27 No Recitation for Thanksgiving
Mon, Nov 30
Bitcoin
  • Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System [PDF]
  • How the Bitcoin protocol actually works [Web Page]
HW5 in
Slides
Video
Wed, Dec 2 Project Deliverables II due, Written report due, Project Presentations in class. Video
Fri, Dec 4 HW 5 discussion, Course Review.