Privacy engineering is an emerging field of engineering which aims to provide methodologies, tools, and techniques to ensure systems provide acceptable levels of
privacy.
In the US, an acceptable level of privacy is defined in terms of compliance to the functional and non-functional requirements set out through a
privacy policy
A privacy policy is a statement or legal document (in privacy law) that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client's data. Personal information can be anything that can be used to identify ...
, which is a contractual artifact displaying the data controlling entities compliance to legislation such as
Fair Information Practices, health record security regulation and other
privacy laws
Privacy law is the body of law that deals with the regulating, storing, and using of personally identifiable information, personal healthcare information, and financial information of individuals, which can be collected by governments, public o ...
. In the EU, however, the
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets the requirements that need to be fulfilled. In the rest of the world, the requirements change depending on local implementations of
privacy and
data protection
Information privacy is the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data, technology, the public expectation of privacy, contextual information norms, and the legal and political issues surrounding them. It is also known as data pr ...
laws.
Definition and scope
The definition of privacy engineering given by
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is:
While privacy has been developing as a legal domain, privacy engineering has only really come to the fore in recent years as the necessity of implementing said privacy laws in information systems has become a definite requirement to the deployment of such information systems. For example, IPEN outlines their position in this respect as:
Privacy engineering involves aspects such as process management,
security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...
,
ontology
In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality.
Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
and
software engineering
Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development.
A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
. The actual application of these derives from necessary legal compliances, privacy policies and 'manifestos' such as
Privacy-by-Design.
Towards the more implementation levels, privacy engineering employs
privacy enhancing technologies to enable
anonymisation and
de-identification of data. Privacy engineering requires suitable security engineering practices to be deployed, and some privacy aspects can be implemented using security techniques. A privacy impact assessment is another tool within this context and its use does not imply that privacy engineering is being practiced.
One area of concern is the proper definition and application of terms such as personal data, personally identifiable information, anonymisation and
pseudo-anonymisation which lack sufficient and detailed enough meanings when applied to software, information systems and data sets.
Another facet of information system privacy has been the ethical use of such systems with particular concern on
surveillance,
big data collection,
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
etc. Some members of the privacy and privacy engineering community advocate for the idea of
ethics engineering or reject the possibility of engineering privacy into systems intended for surveillance.
Software engineers often encounter problems when interpreting legal norms into current technology. Legal requirements are by nature neutral to technology, and will in case of legal conflict be interpreted by a court in the context of the current status of both technology and privacy practice.
Core practices
As this particular field is still in its infancy and somewhat dominated by the legal aspects, the following list just outlines the primary areas on which privacy engineering is based:
*
Data flow modelling
* Development of suitable terminologies/ontologies for expressing types, usages, purposes etc. of information
*
Privacy Impact Assessment A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a process which assists organizations in identifying and managing the privacy risks arising from new projects, initiatives, systems, processes, strategies, policies, business relationships etc. It benefits variou ...
(PIA)
* Privacy management and processes
*
Requirements engineering
Requirements engineering (RE) is the process of defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements in the engineering design process. It is a common role in systems engineering and software engineering.
The first use of the term ''requiremen ...
*
Risk assessment
Broadly speaking, a risk assessment is the combined effort of:
# identifying and analyzing potential (future) events that may negatively impact individuals, assets, and/or the environment (i.e. hazard analysis); and
# making judgments "on the ...
*
Semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...
Despite the lack of a cohesive development of the above areas, courses already exist for the training of privacy engineering. The International Workshop on Privacy Engineering co-located with
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy provides a venue to address "the gap between research and practice in systematizing and evaluating approaches to capture and address privacy issues while engineering information systems".
A number of approaches to privacy engineering exist. The LINDDUN methodology takes a risk-centric approach to privacy engineering where personal data flows at risk are identified and then secured with privacy controls. Guidance for interpretation of the GDPR has been provided in the GDPR recitals, which have been coded into a decision tool
[https://privacypatterns.cs.ru.nl/tool/] that maps GDPR into software engineering forces
with the goal to identify suitable privacy design patterns. One further approach uses eight privacy design strategies - four technical and four administrative strategies - to protect data and to implement data subject rights.
Aspects of information
Privacy engineering is particularly concerned with the processing of information over the following aspects or
ontologies
In computer science and information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definition of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, and entities that substantiate one, many, or all domains ...
and their relations to their implementation in software:
* Data Processing Ontologies
* Information Type Ontologies (as opposed to PII or machine types)
* Notions of controller and processor
* The notions of authority and identity (ostensibly of the source(s) of data)
*
Provenance of information, including the notion of data subject
* Purpose of information, viz: primary vs
secondary collection
*
Semantics of information and data sets (see also noise and
anonymisation)
* Usage of information
Further to this how the above then affect the security classification, risk classification and thus the levels of protection and flow within a system can then the metricised or calculated.
Definitions of privacy
Privacy is an area dominated by legal aspects but requires implementation using, ostensibly, engineering techniques, disciplines and skills. Privacy Engineering as an overall discipline takes its basis from considering privacy not just as a legal aspect or engineering aspect and their unification but also utilizing the following areas:
* Privacy as a philosophical aspect
* Privacy as an economic aspect, particularly
game theory
* Privacy as a sociological aspect
Legal basis
The impetus for technological progress in privacy engineering stems from general
privacy laws and various particular legal acts:
*
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) is a United States federal law, located at ().
The act, effective April 21, 2000, applies to the online collection of personal information by persons or entities under U.S. juri ...
*
Driver's Privacy Protection Act
The Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (also referred to as the "DPPA"), Title XXX of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, is a United States federal statute governing the privacy and disclosure of personal information gathered ...
*
Intimate Privacy Protection Act
The Intimate Privacy Protection Act (IPPA) is a proposed amendment to Title 18 of the United States Code that would make it a crime to distribute nonconsensual pornography. The bill would "provide that it is unlawful to knowingly distribute a priv ...
*
Online Privacy Protection Act
*
Privacy Act of 1974
The Privacy Act of 1974 (, ), a United States federal law, establishes a Code of Fair Information Practice that governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information about individuals that is maintaine ...
*
Privacy Protection Act of 1980
*
Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act of 2006
*
Video Privacy Protection Act
The Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) is a bill that was passed by the United States Congress in 1988 as and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. It was created to prevent what it refers to as "wrongful disclosure of video tape rental ...
See also
*
Data Protection Directive
The Data Protection Directive, officially Directive 95/46/EC, enacted in October 1995, is a European Union directive which regulates the processing of personal data within the European Union (EU) and the free movement of such data. The Data Pro ...
*
Information security
Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorize ...
*
Risk management
* Free and open
MOOC course module on privacy by design and management with
Karlstad University
Karlstad University (Swedish ''Karlstads universitet'') is a state university in Karlstad, Sweden. It was originally established as the Karlstad campus of the University of Gothenburg in 1967, and this campus became an independent university c ...
's Privacy by Design on-line course.
Notes and references
{{Engineering fields
Security engineering
Engineering
Engineering is the use of scientific principles to design and build machines, structures, and other items, including bridges, tunnels, roads, vehicles, and buildings. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more speciali ...