Data Privacy, Ethics and Society

Syllabus

1. 1. What privacy is, and why it's contested

   Privacy is easy to assume and hard to define. Two real, current cases pull the ground out from under the easy definition.

2. 2. Ethical frameworks as tools, not doctrines

   Four lenses for reasoning about privacy when your intuitions can’t tell you why something is wrong — plus a quick map of the data lifecycle we’ll use all term — and what to do when the lenses disagree.

3. 3. Consent and control at the AI frontier
   The mechanism everyone pretends solves privacy — “I agree” — and why it can't. From the everyday (the app you didn't read, the car you didn't know was listening) to the frontier, where the actor is an autonomous AI that did what no agreement ever covered.
4. 4. Governing the risk: frameworks and their limits
   When consent and control fail, the next hope is a framework — a governance standard that names the risks and tells institutions how to manage them. This week we take the leading one, NIST's AI Risk Management Framework, run last week's breach through it, and find both what it catches and where it gives false comfort — with a compressed look at the safeguard it's often paired with: anonymization.
5. 5. Data brokers and the invisible profile

   Personal safeguards keep failing because the problem is structural, not personal. This week: the structure itself — a $389-billion industry that assembles a detailed portrait of you from scattered pieces, sells it for pennies, and answers to no relationship with you at all.

6. 6. When innocence stops protecting you Pillar

   It used to be possible to disappear into a crowd. This week is about the moment that stopped being true — when being unremarkable, blameless, careful, no longer keeps anyone from finding you. The first face of the course’s central break.

7. 7. The consent you can't afford to refuse

   You can leave an app. You can barely live without a car. You cannot easily not work. This week is surveillance you agreed to because the alternative was no paycheck — the nakedest coercion in the course.

8. 8. The end of withholding Pillar

   Everything so far has been about what you hand over — knowingly, unknowingly, or because you couldn’t refuse. This week is different. This week a machine reads a true fact about you off a signal you already gave, a fact no human can see in it, a fact you did not know was there. The second face of the course’s central break — and the one that finishes it.

9. 9. When the machine decides

   The moment the machine stops watching and starts deciding — the interview, the loan, the apartment, the sentence, the benefits that keep you housed — wearing the one disguise bias has never had before: the look of objectivity. Phase 4 opens on discrimination that arrives as math.

10. 14. Arguing the human cost
    Students take a live case and defend a position on its human harm, applying the course's lenses without resolving the tension too cleanly.