Cybersecurity, Surveillance, Privacy and Ethics

Catalog description

This course offers an opportunity for students to look into the surveillance that takes place at all levels in today’s world. The course will first review the collection of surveillance technologies such as CCTV, border control, traffic cameras, etc. The course will then continue onward to look into such innocuous and hidden data collection such as website analytics, app data collection, online identity databases, and more. These topics will be viewed not only from the collection standpoint but also from a privacy standpoint and an ethical standpoint. Students will study these data collections and look at the rationales for their collection and be encouraged to justify or refute these collections on an ethical or privacy basis.