Carnegie Mellon University

Capstone Project

CMU Privacy Engineering students tackle live privacy challenges for Fortune 500 companies, cutting-edge startups, and public service origanizations. 

Our capstone projects are part sandbox and part proving ground. Here you’ll apply the lessons you learned during your coursework, taking the stage as a privacy consultant brought in to work with our client projects. As a privacy engineering lead on these multi-disciplinary teams, it will be your job to reconcile the demands of time-critical design and development activities with the need to develop adequate privacy solutions.

And these projects, these teams, these companies aren’t fabricated or simulated. The challenges you face will be existing problems faced by real clients. From healthcare to social media, from government services to IoT - You will have a chance to work hand and hand with some of the most exciting organizations in tech, business, government, and more!

Past Capstone Sponsors

City of Boston

CMU

Elektra Labs

Ethyca

 

Highmark

KIPP NYC

Mastercard

Meta

noyb

PWC

Silence Laboratories

Spoon

Twitch

ZenData

Featured Capstone Projects

City of

Evaluating Potential Future States of Data Sharing within the City of Boston


Sponsored by: City of Boston

Data sharing within city governments can cultivate improved service delivery, transparency, and trust. The City of Boston aims to foster data sharing with Boston Public Schools (BPS) to improve educational outcomes and budgeting efficiency. Partnering with the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), Katie Earlies, Andrew Berry and Jatan Loya explored the possibilities for sharing information  while maintaining privacy security of student data. 

Read their report

Silence Labs Team

Designing Privacy-Conscious Consent Interfaces: A User Study of Account Aggregator Onboarding Flows


Sponsored by: Silence Laboratories

Aman Priyanshu, Jingxin Shi, Suriya Ganesh examined privacy consent mechanisms for financial data sharing, with a focus on Account Aggregator onboarding processes. Recommending implementation of privacy-conscious interfaces in open finance systems and a replicable approach for evaluating privacy consent mechanisms across different domains.

Read their report

Meta 2024 team

Beyond the Accept Button: How Information and Control Shape Data Sharing and AI Engagement


Sponsored by: Meta

Ibrahim Chhya, Yash Maurya, Zoufei Hong, and Limin Ge studied how consent flow design impacts user engagement with AI features and data sharing in digital platforms and provide design recommendations for creating more effective consent flows that balance user experience with privacy requirements in modern digital platforms.

Read their report