Supporting the Adoption of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies through Requirements Engineering
For software practitioners and researchers, this paper proposes an RE-driven approach to overcome known barriers to PET adoption, but it is an incremental position paper without empirical validation.
This paper examines persistent challenges to the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in software engineering from a requirements engineering (RE) perspective, arguing that RE can facilitate adoption by systematically addressing engineering, business, and legal viewpoints. No concrete results or numbers are provided.
In recent decades, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have been recognized as a means of meeting regulatory and user privacy requirements in software systems that process personal data. Despite substantial research efforts, support from regulators, contributions by large technology companies such as Google and Microsoft, and growing interest among software practitioners, the practical adoption of PETs remains limited. Existing research consistently identifies recurring challenges to PETs adoption in SE, such as technical complexity and insufficient training. Despite ongoing research efforts, these challenges largely remain unresolved in practice. In this industrial challenge paper, we apply a practical, requirements engineering (RE)-driven perspective to examine challenges to PET adoption across multiple stakeholder groups (PET developers, integrators, and adopters) as well as across different disciplinary perspectives (engineering, law, and business). We argue that RE can facilitate the adoption of PETs by systematically addressing each of the complementary engineering, business, and legal viewpoints on privacy. Neglecting challenges in any of these viewpoints (e.g., the impact of PETs on software architecture, their business implications, and their contribution to regulatory compliance) can increase the impediments or even lead to implementation failure. In practice, explicit specification of these viewpoints within RE can enable meaningful coordination among stakeholders to more effectively realize the benefits of PETs in software engineering.