Teaching Privacy at NSF Showcase

^{April 23, 2015}
The Teaching Privacy project was one of 20 groups invited by the National Science Foundation to present their work at the NSF Showcase at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium, the flagship meeting of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education held March 4-6.  An interdisciplinary collaboration between computer scientists, educators, and social scientists at ICSI and UC Berkeley, the Teaching Privacy project is designing a series of teaching modules (e.g., videos, hands-on exercises, interactive applications, guiding questions) to empower students to make informed choices about privacy.  These help demonstrate what happens to personal information on the Internet – and what students can do to better manage information sharing.

At the showcase, Serge Egelman, a senior researcher in Networking and Security; Dan Garcia, a teaching professor at UC Berkeley; and Gerald Friedland, the director of the Audio and Multimedia group, presented the first of their of teaching modules. The modules are organized around ten principles for privacy on the Internet. The first module, organized around the principle “Your Information Footprint Is Larger than You Think,” shows students how online and offline activities generate data that can affect their privacy. The module includes a short animated film and a choose-your-own-adventure classroom activity, called “Oh the Places You (and Your Data) Will Go.”

The work is funded by the National Science Foundation through grants CNS‐1065240 and DGE-1419319, and by the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program through the California Connects program.