Privacy Engineering Demystified: You Too Can Be a Privacy Engineer

In 2018, GDPR brought data privacy to the forefront. The prior regulation had the impact of “ankle biters” and was often ignored. However, the new version has the potential chomp of a Megalodon for non-compliance. The rapid pace of technology innovation, paired with the maturation of the Internet of Things, digitation/automation efforts along with big/deep data analysis, creates a world where ensuring data privacy seems impossible. Every week there are new reports of data breaches or privacy violations. Two recent examples are Ring Doorbell and Facebook. Privacy engineering is a technical process that when incorporated into the solution development lifecycle process, can help ensure that data privacy requirements are met and/or at least the gaps are understood and what mitigation steps are needed before the product or solution is made available to customers or implemented within an organization. 

The talk will demonstrate the critical role of privacy engineering and will highlight that software engineers and program/product managers can be privacy engineers. We will provide high level concepts of privacy engineering and discuss how this process can be integrated into an organization’s development lifecycle process.