Communications of the ACM
Privacy Engineering Superheroes
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Does your organization want to offer cookie choices without annoying popups? Do you want to share sensitive data in aggregate form without risking a privacy breach? Do you want to monitor data flows to ensure personal information does not end up in unexpected places? What if personal information does leak out and now you need to clean up the mess? Do you want to do this in the messy, failure-prone world of a large system? Who ya gonna call? How about a privacy engineer!
The privacy profession is dominated by lawyers—who certainly play a critical role—but privacy engineers are often the real superheros when things go wrong, and essential to preventing privacy disasters. Privacy engineering has emerged as a growing discipline focused on finding practical and often technical solutions to privacy protection. Organizations hire privacy engineers to develop privacy-protective products and services, build tools to promote and monitor privacy compliance throughout their organization, and to detect and remediate privacy problems. Privacy engineers may play a holistic role or focus on specific areas such as front-end, back-end, user experience, product management, or legal compliance.1
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