Privacy Engineering: Shaping an Emerging Field of Research and Practice

Addressing privacy and data protection systematically throughout the process of engineering information systems is a daunting task. Although the research community has made significant progress in theory and in labs, meltdowns in recent years suggest that we're still struggling to address systemic privacy issues. Privacy engineering, an emerging field, responds to this gap between research and practice. It's concerned with systematizing and evaluating approaches to capture and address privacy issues with engineering information systems. This article serves to illuminate this nascent field. The authors provide a definition of privacy engineering and describe encompassing activities. They expand on these with findings from the First International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE), and conclude with future challenges.