Privacy Engineering

With an increasing need for data protection, triggered not only by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union, one could observe the emergence of a new engineering discipline. Privacy engineers combine competencies from data protection, IT security and Privacy by Design. Privacy engineers work in interdisciplinary teams of users, lawyers, developers and IT security experts with the goal to improve technology. In this work, functionality and data protection are equally important goals, thus fulfilling the requirements of Ann Cavoukian’s “Privacy by Design - The 7 Foundational Principles”. [1]

A great example of privacy engineering is Differential Privacy. We use it to answer statistical questions in large databases without compromising the privacy of individuals. With the adoption by big corporate players such as Google [2] and Apple [3], the technology has shown its significance.

As a new discipline, Privacy Engineering has many fields of active development and research. We expect many interesting results in the coming years for example in the topics of measuring privacy, standardization and privacy architectures.

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