Course Overview

The class is a seminar course on human-centered privacy design and systems. In this class, we will explore the topic of designing and developing privacy-aware digital systems by providing an overview of technical, design, and legal perspectives. Students will learn theoretical frameworks of privacy, privacy design principles, privacy laws, and privacy-enhancing technologies. We will also cover user research methods that are useful for designing and evaluating digital systems that are aware of and respectful to users’ privacy preferences, informed by their lived experiences. In the latter part of this course, we will discuss special topics in human-centered privacy design and system building, including the privacy implications of emerging technologies (e.g., LLM, XR), inclusive privacy design challenges, and engineering support for privacy by design.

Learning Objectives

Privacy issues are becoming a primary concern in the increasingly connected and data-intensive world. This course aims to equip students with the skills and knowledge to manage privacy issues responsibly as researchers and practitioners. Specifically, by taking this course, you are expected to gain:

  • Systematic and human-centered approaches to analyzing privacy challenges in digital systems and emerging technologies.
  • A skill set for proposing practical solutions to privacy challenges using a combination of human-centered design and technical system building.
  • The ability to appreciate, critique, and conduct research at the intersection of HCI and privacy.

Administrivia

Classroom: West Village H (WVH) 166
Time: Monday and Wednesday 2:50-4:30pm
Instructor: Tianshi Li
Office: 177 Huntington Ave, 505
Office Hours: Wednesday 1-2pm

Grading

  • 20% Class Participation
  • 20% Reading Commentaries
  • 20% Discussion Lead
  • 40% Project, including
    • 5% Project proposal (Due: Sep 25)
    • 10% Mid-term Presentation
    • 15% Final presentation
    • 10% Final project report

Schedule

Note: The class schedule is tentative and subject to change! Please check the online schedule frequently.

Week Topic Date Activity Reading List
Week 1 Introduction Sep 2 (Labor day, no class) N/A
Sep 4 Lecture
Week 2 Key concepts in privacy Sep 9 Lecture The Slow Violence of Surveillance Capitalism (FAccT 2023)

Deepfakes, Phrenology, Surveillance, and More! A Taxonomy of AI Privacy Risks

PrivacyLens: Evaluating Privacy Norm Awareness of Language Models in Action
Sep 11 Discussion
Week 3 Foundations of human-centered privacy Sep 16 Lecture “My Data Just Goes Everywhere:” User Mental Models of the Internet and Implications for Privacy and Security

Privacy and human behavior in the age of information

Expectation and purpose: understanding users' mental models of mobile app privacy through crowdsourcing (UbiComp 2012)
Sep 18 Discussion
Week 4 Privacy and Compliance Sep 23 Lecture Toggles, Dollar Signs, and Triangles: How to (In)Effectively Convey Privacy Choices with Icons and Link Texts (CHI 2021)

Understanding Dark Patterns in Home IoT Devices (CHI 2023)

Honesty is the Best Policy: On the Accuracy of Apple Privacy Labels Compared to Apps' Privacy Policies (PETS 2024)
Sep 25 Discussion
Week 5 Privacy Design Principles Sep 30 Lecture A Design Space for Effective Privacy Notices (SOUPS 2015)

Automating Contextual Privacy Policies: Design and Evaluation of a Production Tool for Digital Consumer Privacy Awareness (CHI 2022)

“I’m not convinced that they don’t collect more than is necessary”: User-Controlled Data Minimization Design in Search Engines (USENIX Security 2024)
Oct 2 Discussion
Week 6 Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Oct 7 Guest Lecture (Speaker: Dr. Jayshree Sarathy) "I need a better description'': An Investigation Into User Expectations For Differential Privacy (CCS 2021)

Don’t Look at the Data! How Differential Privacy Reconfigures the Practices of Data Science (CHI 2023)

Image DePO: Towards Gradual Decentralization of Online Social Networks using Decentralized Privacy Overlays (CSCW 2022)
Oct 9 Discussion
Week 7 AI Privacy Oct 14 (Indigenous Peoples’ Day, no class) Human-Centered Privacy Research in the Age of Large Language Models
Oct 16 Guest Lecture (Speaker: Ken Liu)
Week 8 AI privacy (LLM) Oct 21 Lecture “It’s a Fair Game”, or Is It? Examining How Users Navigate Disclosure Risks and Benefits When Using LLM-Based Conversational Agents (CHI 2024)

What Does it Mean for a Language Model to Preserve Privacy? (FAccT 2022)

Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models
Oct 23 Discussion
Week 9 AI Privacy (Multimodal) Oct 28 Mid-term Project Presentation Granular Privacy Control for Geolocation with Vision Language Models

CONFIDANT: A Privacy Controller for Social Robots (HRI 2022)

Iteratively Prompting Multimodal LLMs to Reproduce Natural and AI-Generated Images (COLM 2024)
Oct 30 Discussion
Week 10 XR and Privacy Nov 4 Lecture Security and Privacy for Augmented Reality: Our 10-Year Retrospective

Going Incognito in the Metaverse: Achieving Theoretically Optimal Privacy-Usability Tradeoffs in VR (UIST 2023)

When the User Is Inside the User Interface: An Empirical Study of UI Security Properties in Augmented Reality (USENIX Security 2024)
Nov 6 Discussion
Week 11 Inclusive Privacy Nov 11 (Veterans Day, no class) Designing Accessible Obfuscation Support for Blind Individuals’ Visual Privacy Management (CHI 2024)

“If sighted people know, I should be able to know:” Privacy Perceptions of Bystanders with Visual Impairments around Camera-based Technology (USENIX Security 2023)

“A Stalker's Paradise”: How Intimate Partner Abusers Exploit Technology (CHI 2018)
Nov 13 Lecture
Week 12 Designers and developers Nov 18 Lecture How Developers Talk About Personal Data and What It Means for User Privacy: A Case Study of a Developer Forum on Reddit (CSCW 2021)

"I Don't Know If We're Doing Good. I Don't Know If We're Doing Bad": Investigating How Practitioners Scope, Motivate, and Conduct Privacy Work When Developing AI Products (USENIX Security 2024)

Farsight: Fostering Responsible AI Awareness During AI Application Prototyping (CHI 2024)

Nov 20 Discussion
Week 13 Inclusive Privacy (discussion) Nov 25 Discussion Discussing the readings in Week 11
Nov 27 (Fall break, no class)
Week 14 Wrap-up & Recap Dec 2 Final presentation N/A
Dec 4 Lecture

Additional reading