Artificial Intelligence

Aims The idea behind this capita selecta course is to treat a topic within the broad field of cyber security in-depth. The topic may vary over the years, but it will be a topic that is highly relevant and important and one that is an active area of research within the Digital Security group at ICIS. The current topic is 'Online Tracking and Privacy' and the course will be taught by dr. Günes Acar. Learning objectives: at the end of the course students understand key online tracking mechanisms; can audit websites, mobile applications and IoT devices to identify tracking and data collection practices; understand the privacy and security implications of online tracking; understand how countermeasures against online tracking works; can explain how privacy-preserving telemetry and client-side data collection works. Content Topics covered in the course include: stateful and stateless cross-site tracking on the web (e.g. cookies, super-cookies, browser fingerprinting, cookie syncing); microtargeting and behavioral advertising; intentional and unintentional exfiltration of personal data; countermeasures against password leaks; countermeasures against web tracking, at browser or network level; tracking on mobile platforms; IoT devices and privacy (e.g. data collection from smart home devices and by smart TV channels); online manipulation: microtargeting and dark patterns; practical analysis of online privacy practices for the web, mobile devices, and IoT, including building web crawlers for large scale measurements and using machine learning techniques for analysis; privacy-preserving analytics, telemetry, and advertising (e.g. RAPPOR, Local Differential Privacy, Mozilla Prio, Google FLoC).