2020/07/16 by Blagovesta Kostova, Kostova, Blagovesta, Seda Gürses +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Advanced Malware Detection Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data #Software Engineering (cs.SE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.08613
openalex publication_date 2020/07/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.