We Need Privacy Engineering Because Technical Solutions Aren't Working

I dislike starting an article with a litany of incidents in which the IT industry has failed its users, but here’s a taste: Equifax, 143 million people; Yahoo, 3 billion people; Target, 110 million people; JPMorgan Chase, 78 million people.

In the wake of these catastrophic data leaks, media and industry insiders focused on technical security failings, which were indeed egregious. But privacy doesn’t begin and end with security and there is no purely technical solution to privacy issues. We know how to build secure systems, but for consumer privacy to become a reality, thinking around systems engineering and security must be part of a larger story that encompasses policy, legal, and regulatory issues, development methodologies, incentives, consumer expectations, and social factors. The relatively new field of privacy engineering aims to do just that.

Privacy engineering has been defined as a method for implementing the principles of privacy by design, an approach that accounts for privacy throughout the design and engineering process. Privacy engineering aims to ensure that privacy policy is proactively applied during every phase of product and service development.

Rather than a “best effort” approach dictated by time-to-market constraints and other negative incentives, privacy engineering takes a holistic approach that includes consumer concerns, operational imperatives, and system engineering to guide development in a direction that improves privacy outcomes.

Privacy engineering has broader application than the avoidance of embarrassing and harmful data leaks. It takes into account users’ reasonable desire for data privacy. As National Institution of Standards and Technology (NIST) Senior Privacy Policy Analyst Naomi Lefkovitz points out, “Communities aren’t concerned that their information isn’t securely protected.” Rather they’re concerned about how their data is being exploited by the businesses they entrust it to.

One of my favorite examples of a company putting privacy first is Apple’s use of differential privacy. Like all companies, Apple wants to know how consumers use its products. But, recognizing the business advantages of being seen to care about user privacy, Apple implemented a system that allows it to collect useful aggregate data anonymously. Apple gets its data, and users maintain their privacy because Apple can’t identify where the data is coming from.

Apple’s differential privacy is an example of how taking privacy policy seriously constrains engineers and forces them them to devise novel solutions.

In the coming years, consumer awareness of privacy issues will shape markets. The 300 million people affected by the Equifax data leak have been given a taste of what can happen when companies don’t take privacy seriously. That breach and the no-doubt many breaches to come will influence where consumers spend their money, and that means privacy engineering will play a central role in building the successful products of the future.