Privacy-enhancing Technologies

Course content
This course has been developed within SWITS, which is the Swedish IT Security Network for PhD students. The course covers: 

• Legal context for privacy in Europe
• Fundamental privacy terminology and concepts
• A range of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)

Online participation is offered for remote students. 

Learning outcomes
Privacy has become an increasingly important topic as our data and data about us is both increasing and more and more being collected and mined. This course will give an overview of privacy concepts and terminology as well as concrete examples of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and some of their applications. 

The students should be able to:

• recognize threats to privacy
• explain the basic privacy terminology and concepts and use them correctly
• find and apply documentation of privacy-related problems and technologies
• get an overview of existing privacy-enhancing technologies  (PETs)
• analyze system PET descriptions in terms of their privacy protection and how they work
• identify vulnerabilities of system descriptions and predict their corresponding threats
• select counter-measures to identified threats and argue their effectiveness
• compare counter-measures and evaluate their side-effects
• present and explain their reasoning to others

such that the students can:

• reason about privacy in general and PETs in particular and
• incorporate existing PETs into their research or start developing new ones.

For doctoral student in