Hands-on privacy labs

Laboratory exercises are important in all technical disciplines including information security. Development of reliable laboratory exercises covering rapidly changing topics takes a lot of time and resources. Instructors often prefer to cover an ever-changing topic using textbook materials and additional readings rather than developing a new lab exercise. Privacy is one of those topics. This paper presents a virtual environment developed for hands-on exercises that will complement theoretical coverage of privacy topics. In these exercises, students will investigate technical aspects of privacy such as user tracking, data aggregation, and various tools such as Firefox add-on Collusion.