CSC 433 - Privacy in the Digital Age, Spring 2025

• Overview
• Syllabus
• Schedule
• Assignments
• Project

** Lecture topics and readings are subject to change as the semester evolves. Slides will be uploaded right after class.

Date	Topic	Reading	Note
01/07	Introduction and course overview [Slide]	Privacy [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy] A Taxonomy on Privacy (Optional) Privacy as Contextual Integrity	Watch Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters (2014) TED Talk Watch Alessandro Acquisti: Why privacy matters (2013) TED Talk
Topic: Database Privacy
01/09	Data De-anonymization [Slide]	Revisiting the uniqueness of simple demographics in the US population Robust de-anonymization of large sparse datasets (Optional) You Might Also Like: Privacy Risks of Collaborative Filtering (Optional) You are who you know: inferring user profiles in online social networks
01/14	k-anonymity [Slide]	k-anonymity: A model for protecting privacy Incognito: Efficient Full-Domain K-Anonymity
01/16	l-diversity, t-closeness [Slide]	l-diversity: Privacy beyond k-anonymity t-closeness: Privacy beyond k-anonymity and l-diversity
01/21	Differential privacy [Slide]	Differential Privacy (Optional) No Free Lunch in Data Privacy (Optional) Differentially Private Recommender Systems: Building Privacy into the Netflix Prize Contenders	Tutorial on Differential Privacy
01/23	Private Information Retrieval (PIR) [Slide]	Private information retrieval (Optional) Replication Is Not Needed: Single Database, Computationally-Private Information Retrieval (Optional) A survey on Private Information Retrieval (Optional) A Survey of Single-Database PIR: Techniques and Applications
Topic: Online Privacy
01/28	Online tracking: stateful [Slide]	Detecting and Defending Against Third-Party Tracking on the Web (Optional) Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis (Optional) Third-party web tracking: Policy and technology
01/30	Online tracking: stateless [Slide]	How unique is your web browser? (Optional) Cookieless monster: Exploring the ecosystem of web-based device fingerprinting (Optional) Pixel perfect: Fingerprinting canvas in HTML5 (Optional) The Web Never Forgets: Persistent Tracking Mechanisms in the Wild
02/04	Privacy tools for web browsing [Slide]	Block Me If You Can: A Large-Scale Study of Tracker-Blocking Tools (Optional) Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology (Optional) ShareMeNot: Balancing Privacy and Functionality of Third-Party Social Widgets (Optional) Why Johnny Can't Opt Out: A Usability Evaluation of Tools to Limit Online Behavioral Advertising
02/06	Anonymous communication [Slide]	Anonymity, Unlinkability, Undetectability, Unobservability,Pseudonymity, and Identity Management – A Consolidated Proposal for Terminology (Optional) Third-Party Web Tracking: Policy and Technology
02/11	No Class	Wellness Day
02/13	Tor network [Slide]	Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (Optional) On the Effectiveness of Traffic Analysis Against Anonymity Networks Using Flow Records
02/18	Midterm Exam Review	In class discussion
02/20	Midterm Exam	In class exam	Topics covered upto 02/13 (inclusive)
Topic: Machine learning and Privacy
02/25	Privacy Attacks on machine learning models (part 1) [Slide]	Privacy in pharmacogenetics: an end-to-end case study of personalized warfarin dosing Property Inference Attacks on Fully Connected Neural Networks using Permutation Invariant Representations A Survey of Privacy Attacks in Machine Learning	Property Inference Attacks on Fully Connected Neural Networks using Permutation Invariant Representations Privacy in pharmacogenetics: an end-to-end case study of personalized warfarin dosing
02/27	Privacy Attacks on machine learning models (part 2) [Slide]	Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models (Optional) Hacking Smart Machines with Smarter Ones: How to Extract Meaningful Data from Machine Learning Classifiers (Optional) Privacy Risk in Machine Learning: Analyzing the Connection to Overfitting
03/04	Privacy and safety issues with generative AI [Slide]
03/06	Privacy perserving machine learning [Slide]	Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning (Optional) Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training Data
03/11	No Class	Spring break
03/13	No Class	Spring break
03/18	Fairness and auditing of automated systems [Slide]	Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites (Optional) Automated Experiments on Ad Privacy Settings: A Tale of Opacity, Choice, and Discrimination (Optional) Peeking Beneath the Hood of Uber
Topic: Legal Aspects of Privacy
03/20	Privacy acts and frameworks [Slide]	Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) EU General Data Protection Regulation Summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule (Optional) Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) (Optional) Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)
03/25	Privacy notices [Slide]	A Large-Scale Evaluation of U.S. Financial Institutions' Standardized Privacy Notices Putting Disclosures to the Test (Optional) Necessary But Not Sufficient: Standardized Mechanisms for Privacy Notice and Choice (Optional) A Comparative Study of Online Privacy Policies and Formats
03/27	Privacy policy compliance [Slide]	Privee: An architecture for automatically analyzing web privacy policies (Optional) Automated analysis of privacy requirements for mobile apps (Optional) An Automated Approach to Auditing Disclosure of Third-Party Data Collection in Website Privacy Policies
Topic: Perception of Privacy
04/01	Privacy index and Factors influencing privacy attitude [Slide]	Privacy Indexes: A Survey of Westin's Studies (Optional) Would a Privacy Fundamentalist Sell Their DNA for $1000… If Nothing Bad Happened as a Result? The Westin Categories, Behavioral Intentions, and Consequences Who is Concerned About What? A Study of American, Chinese and Indian Users’ Privacy Concerns on Social Network Sites Privacy Expectations and Preferences in an IoT World (Optional) Beyond concern: Understanding net users' attitudes about online privacy (Optional) My Data Just Goes Everywhere: User Mental Models of the Internet and Implications for Privacy and Security (Optional) Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences
04/03	Modeling users' privacy preferences [Slide]	Modeling Users' Mobile App Privacy Preferences: Restoring Usability in a Sea of Permission Settings (Optional) Follow My Recommendations: A Personalized Assistant for Mobile App Permissions (Optional) Privacy-Aware Autonomous Agents for Pervasive Healthcare (Optional) Personalized Privacy Assistants for the Internet of Things: Providing Users with Notice and Choice
Topic: Emerging Privacy Threats
04/08	Bitcoin and privacy [Slide]	Bitcoin (Optional) Narayanan et al. (first two chapters)	Video lecture bitcoin-what-is-it bitcoin
04/10	Network-level Inference attacks [Slide]	Effective Attacks and Provable Defenses for Website Fingerprinting Remote physical device fingerprinting (Optional) k-fingerprinting: A Robust Scalable Website Fingerprinting Technique (Optional) Spying on the Smart Home: Privacy Attacks and Defenses on Encrypted IoT Traffic
04/15	Acoustic and Motion sensor based inference attacks [Slide]	Acoustic Side-Channel Attacks on Additive Manufacturing Systems Gyrophone: Recognizing Speech From Gyroscope (Optional) Keyboard Acoustic Emanations (Optional) My Smartphone Knows What You Print: Exploring Smartphone-based Side-channel Attacks Against 3D Printers (Optional) Single-stroke Language-Agnostic Keylogging using Stereo-Microphones and Domain Specific Machine Learning TouchLogger: Inferring Keystrokes On Touch Screen From Smartphone Motion (Optional) Systematic Classification of Side-Channel Attacks: A Case Study for Mobile Devices
04/17	Privacy risks in VR/AR [Slide]
04/22	Final Exam Review [Slide]	In class discussion	Final privacy incident report due
04/29	Final Exam	In Class (8:30-11am)	Excluding Mid-term Exam Content