Course title: IS 698: Technical and Policy Issues of Privacy

Description: This course introduces students to concepts and methods for protecting privacy sensitive information while allowing individuals or organizations to collect and share such information for worthy purposes. Topics include, but are not limited to basic concepts of privacy, privacy protection laws and principles, privacy protection models such as K-anonymity and L-diversity, privacy preserving data mining techniques, privacy issues in healthcare, internet privacy, privacy issues in location-based services, and privacy issues in social networks. Students will keep abreast of the latest research innovations in the field of privacy protection. In addition, students will get hands-on experience in a course project.

Prerequisites: IS 620 or equivalent, or permission of instructor.

Please contact Dr. Chen at zhchen@umbc.edu if you have any questions.

FAQ:

·        What this course is about?

This course covers policy and technical issues in privacy protection. As data sharing becomes ubiquitous, there are great concerns of privacy leak (e.g., revealing the identity of a medical record). This course will cover topics such as basic concepts of privacy, privacy protection laws and principles, privacy protection models such as K-anonymity and L-diversity, privacy preserving data mining techniques, privacy issues in healthcare, internet privacy, privacy issues in location-based services, and privacy issues in social networks.

·        Does this course cover new content?

The content is not covered by any other IS courses. 

• What are the requirements for this course?

Students will read some research papers and each student will be asked to present one of them in class. There will be also in class discussions and some homework. Students also need to finish a group project. Students can either do an implementation project or a survey project. The implementation project is for those who are comfortable with programming. In such a project students will implement a privacy protection technique (e.g., random perturbation) and run some experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the technique. The survey project is for students who are not comfortable with programming. In such a project students will design and conduct a survey on some privacy issues. The students also need to analyze the results of the survey. The instructor will help students choose the project topic. There will be NO exam for this course. 

• Do I have to take IS 620 before taking this course?

IS 620 is recommended. However, as long as you have some experiences with databases and data mining, you will be able to take this course.