Rishab Nithyanand, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, will tackle the enforcement of consumer privacy regulations with the help of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). 

The award, the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty, includes a five-year grant for $633,023. Nithyanand and his team will develop a variety of computational tools to help enforcement agencies perform large-scale audits to determine if organizations are complying with consumer privacy regulations. 

“One of the things you realize as you delve into regulatory enforcement, particularly with privacy, is that agencies really aren’t well staffed or well resourced,” Nithyanand said. “We want to build computational tools to make their investigations and operations more efficient and scalable.” 

Unlike current automated methods, which gather data first and then determine if the organization is following regulations, Nithyanand will build an auditing framework based on current mandates in privacy regulations to determine the likelihood that an organization is violating the law without accessing their internal data. 

“We’re not suggesting we can replace human investigators,” he said. “We’re hoping to make their work more efficient by pointing out exactly what they should focus their investigation on.”

In addition to identifying privacy law violations, Nithyanand will develop low-cost mechanisms to let organizations know about potential violations and rectify them without expending precious enforcement agency resources. 

The project comes at a critical time—18 states have data privacy laws on the books, and seven states will begin enforcement in 2025. Nithyanand will create tools that can be adjusted to the specifics of each state’s legislation. 

The award will also support Nithyanand in growing his trailblazing collaboration with the College of Law.  For three years, Nithyanand and law professor Mihailis Diamantis have co-taught Privacy Law and Technology, which enrolls both graduate computer science and law students. They also co-lead the  Sentinels for Privacy-Aware and Responsible Technological Advancement (SPARTA), the first lab to allow research assistants from the Department of Computer Science and the College of Law to work side by side on internet privacy studies. 

 This spring the pair began expanding their interdisciplinary efforts by integrating legal education into undergraduate computer science curriculum. 

“This law and computer science collaboration is very unique,” Nithyanand said. “We are one of a handful of American universities, possibly the first, to offer computer science and law students the opportunity to take the same data privacy course side by side and to pursue research on these issues beyond the classroom together.”