Collaborative Research: SaTC: EDU: Developing Curriculum, Hands-on Labs, and Research Platform to Engage Students in Privacy Compliance Education

About This Grant

In our digital era, people are overwhelmed with apps that routinely collect user data, some of which may include personal information. Despite their popularity and convenience, user-centric apps are raising growing concerns about user privacy risks. To address privacy concerns, it is essential to inform users about how these apps handle their data. At the same time, privacy and data protection regulations have been enacted in many countries to safeguard user privacy. To comply with these regulations, software developers are required to provide clear and transparent privacy policies that disclose how their apps collect, store, and share user data. To meet the ever-increasing demand in ethical software development regarding privacy compliance, this project creates effective, engaging, and openly accessible learning materials on this topic. Through its proposed activities, this project cultivates a strong privacy-aware mindset among students, equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to assess privacy compliance in user-centric apps across various platforms. This project enhances privacy compliance education by creating new curriculum content, hands-on labs, and a research platform informed by state-of-the-art research in privacy compliance, including relevant laws and regulations, methodologies for identifying potential privacy compliance violations in software apps (e.g., static and dynamic analysis to extract data collection behaviors), and consistency between disclosed data practices and actual app behavior. The proposed hands-on labs offer students an in-depth understanding of privacy compliance through experimentation, and the research platform helps students to conduct new research in privacy compliance. In addition, this project adopts a learner-centered approach by actively involving students in the collaborative development and refinement of open educational resources for privacy compliance education. This project also includes efforts to promote widespread adoption of the proposed learning materials. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.