Security, Privacy, and Ethics

Author

Claire McKay Bowen, PhD

Published

June 23, 2025

Welcome to DAN 607 - Summer 2025

This Quarto book is the notes for DAN 607: Security, Privacy, and Ethics (+Equity) in the Business Analytics Program at Meehan School of Business within Stonehill College.

Course Meeting Time (EDT)

  • June 30th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • July 7th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • July 14th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • July 21st, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • July 28th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • August 4th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
  • August 11th, Monday, 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Course Description

At what point does the sacrifice to our personal information outweigh the public good?

In a world driven by data, data users and researchers frequently leverage personal or confidential data to help policymakers make evidence-based, data-informed decisions, such as improving economic recovery or creating a more efficient COVID-19 vaccine distribution. However, access to confidential data comes with several privacy concerns, especially for underrepresented groups such as those living in rural communities. Striking the right balance is crucial to avoid real disclosure risks that may not be obvious, like stalkers utilizing excessive location data or malicious parties learning sensitive medical information through linkable health or genetic data.

This course will cover the security, privacy, ethics, and equity considerations the U.S. government and private sector must navigate throughout the data life cycle: data acquisition or collection, data storage, data sharing and transfer, data analysis and dissemination, and data destruction or termination. Specifically, students will understand the legal, social, and ethical ramifications of data security and privacy as well as the concepts behind data guardianship, and custodianship, and data permissions.

At a high level, the main learning objectives/topic areas of this course are learning the:

  • importance of data security, privacy, and ethics
  • ways experts develop privacy preserving methods throughout the data life cycle
  • privacy laws governing and protecting people’s information
  • issues that society must consider advancing and improving security, privacy, ethics, and equity

Textbook (Bowen 2021)

Title: Protecting Your Privacy in a Data-Driven World

Author: Claire McKay Bowen

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 978-0367640743

Past versions of the course

I began teaching this course in the summer of 2022, but I did not start publishing the course materials until the summer of 2024. Below are links to past materials, which serve as an archive reflecting how privacy, security, and ethics continue to evolve in our ever-changing digital world.

Acknowledgements

Thank you Aaron R. Williams for teaching me how to create a Quarto document/book for this course, which is what we use for all our teaching and training materials at the Urban Institute. Check out his Quarto book for his Data Science for Public Policy course in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.