The Teaching Privacy Curriculum

Abstract

A basic understanding of online privacy is essential to being an informed digital citizen, and therefore basic privacy education is becoming ever more necessary. Recently released high school and college computer science curricula acknowledge the significantly increased importance of fundamental knowledge about privacy, but do not yet provide concrete content in the area. To address this need, over the past two years, we have developed the Teaching Privacy Project (TPP) curriculum, http://teachingprivacy.org, which educates the general public about online privacy issues. We performed a pilot of our curriculum in a university course for non-CS majors and found that it was effective: weeks after last being exposed, students' privacy attitudes had shifted. In this paper, we describe our curriculum, our evaluation of it in the classroom, and our vision for future privacy education.