Course overview
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.
Course learning outcomes
- Evaluate the compliance of privacy properties and policies of web and mobile applications with respect to Australian and International privacy laws and regulations.
- Interpret information privacy and data protection requirements to rethink the design and build of products to reduce risks in different privacy critical scenarios.
- Assess privacy vulnerabilities and design flaws of various products, such as web and mobile applications, to inform better designs in the future.
- Analyse privacy-preserving approaches in software systems to identify strengths and weaknesses of privacy-enhancing technologies including differential privacy.
- Develop appropriate differential privacy mechanisms when synthesising data tailored for real-world applications.