Emphasizing ethics and privacy preservation in an undergraduate data mining course

In recent years, many universities have begun to integrate data mining into undergraduate elective offerings, and data management and data mining have evolved into important academic disciplines. Although many universities now offer undergraduate-level courses in data mining and several excellent texts are available, few courses or books focus on other critical data mining concerns such as ethics, security and privacy issues. This paper describes an initial course offering in which a privacy preserving data mining module focusing specifically on protecting privacy and the identity of the data owner was infused into an undergraduate data mining course.