Informatics lecturer Hadar Ziv will be a research collaborator in a groundbreaking NSF-funded project titled “Privacy Compliance by Design: Ideation Techniques to Facilitate System Design Compliant with Privacy Laws and Regulations.”

The project attempts to bring privacy protection to the forefront of software developer’s minds in the wake of the explosion of big data. “Software professionals typically have no formal training or education on sociotechnical aspects of privacy. As a result, addressing privacy issues raised by a system is frequently an afterthought and/or a matter of compliance-check during the late phases of the system development lifecycle,” the project’s abstract explains. To tackle this challenge, the project’s research team will develop “privacy ideation cards” based on relevant U.S. laws and regulations, which “can potentially transform how privacy-relevant aspects are handled in real-world software solutions built by industry and inform how students are taught these issues in undergraduate software curricula.” The team includes Principal Investigator Sameer Patil from New York University, who received a $175,000 Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) for the project, Ziv, Janice Tsai of Microsoft and Jonathan Fox of Intel.

In addition to the deck of privacy ideation cards, the project will promote privacy by design, making privacy protection a built-in framework for all software development. Ziv will connect the research team with students in his senior Capstone Informatics project course, “as a test-bed for ideas and presentations related to privacy,” Ziv says. “Their engagement will affect change in the students’ projects. I will likely participate in collecting and analyzing data about those changes.”