Reasoning about information: an example
By: Ed Felten | Jul 23, 2012 1:02PM
One of the reasons it's hard to think carefully about privacy is that privacy is fundamentally about information, and our (uneducated) intuition about information is often unreliable.
As a teacher, I have tried different approaches to helping students get over this barrier. It's not too hard to teach the theory, so that students learn how to manipulate logical formulas to answer contrived story problems about information and inference. What is more difficult is augmenting the formal theory with a more accurate intuition that is useful outside the classroom.
