Advanced Topics in Computer Science: Privacy in the World of Big Data

An introduction to privacy challenges that arise due to ubiquitous use of technology and ease of data collection and analysis. An overview of algorithmic approaches to addressing them, with a focus on statistical data privacy -- the problem of making useful inferences based on data of many individuals while ensuring each individual's privacy. We survey plausible-sounding approaches that fail, followed by a study of privacy definitions and useful algorithms satisfying those definitions, including in real-world applications. We conclude with a survey of technical aspects of topics at the frontier of current privacy discourse, such as tracking.