Educating Engineers: Teaching Privacy in a World of Open Doors

Although the focus here on teaching privacy to computer scientists, the author wants to first mention the law school approach, which is, of course, lawyerly. The topics in a typical law school course on information privacy include the development of privacy within the law; privacy law in commercial practice, health information, and communications; privacy and data protection, including the international aspects of this; and regulatory frameworks for privacy. In rare cases, mostly those in which the faculty member does cyberlaw research, the course might cover technological protections for privacy. Undergraduate and graduate computer science courses in privacy have different audiences and different goals from law school ones; they also differ from each other. An undergraduate course should present myriad privacy approaches, whereas a graduate course might well focus on current technological research.