Announcing Privacy Tech Courses

TL;DR: not enough resources exist for people to teach themselves about data privacy and related technologies. I'm creating a platform to help change that.

When I first started learning about Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML), all of the content seemed written for graduate-level computer science students, featuring discussions of complex algorithms and equations from domains such as information theory and cryptography. With the help of an undergraduate mathematics degree and some friends I made in different open-source groups, I was able to build a foundation of knowlege in privacy technologies, but it was clear that most PETs and PPML content was not made for self-study.¹

When I joined the xD team of the US Census Bureau, I unexpectedly assumed the role of the go-to privacy person on the team. I found myself answering questions about privacy attacks, federated learning, etc. and putting together ad-hoc documentation for colleagues and stakeholders to review. And once I did this a few times, a few overlapping thoughts occurred to me:

• There's clearly an underserved market for technical privacy content, especially for beginners
• I have a background both in web development and privacy-preserving machine learning
• I've spent several years developing privacy-preserving software, including documenting and demonstrating how it works to other engineers, data scientists, and policy experts

It seemed obvious that I should start a business focused on creating beginner-friendly content to teach others how PETs and other privacy technologies work.

And that's exactly what I'm excited to launch today: https://privacytechcourses.com/.