Privacy Engineering Meets Software Engineering. On the Challenges of Engineering Privacy ByDesign
This addresses the challenge of integrating privacy by design into modern software development for practitioners, highlighting an incremental gap in research alignment.
The paper identifies a misalignment between academic privacy engineering solutions and current software engineering practices, such as service architectures and agile development, which hinders the operationalization of privacy-enhancing technologies in real-world systems.
Current day software development relies heavily on the use of service architectures and on agile iterative development methods to design, implement, and deploy systems. These practices result in systems made up of multiple services that introduce new data flows and evolving designs that escape the control of a single designer. Academic privacy engineering literature typically abstracts away such conditions of software production in order to achieve generalizable results. Yet, through a systematic study of the literature, we show that proposed solutions inevitably make assumptions about software architectures, development methods and scope of designer control that are misaligned with current practices. These misalignments are likely to pose an obstacle to operationalizing privacy engineering solutions in the wild. Specifically, we identify important limitations in the approaches that researchers take to design and evaluate privacy enhancing technologies which ripple to proposals for privacy engineering methodologies. Based on our analysis, we delineate research and actions needed to re-align research with practice, changes that serve a precondition for the operationalization of academic privacy results in common software engineering practices.