Alexandra Klymenko (Technical University of Munich), Stephen Meisenbacher (Technical University of Munich), Luca Favaro (Technical University of Munich), and Florian Matthes (Technical University of Munich)

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) have gained considerable attention in the past decades, particularly in academia but also in practical settings. The proliferation of promising technologies from research presents only one perspective, and the true success of PETs should also be measured in their adoption in the industry. Yet, a potential issue arises with the very terminology of Privacy-Enhancing Technology: what exactly is a PET, and what is not? To tackle this question, we begin with the academic side, investigating various definitions of PETs proposed in the literature over the past 30 years. Next, we compare our findings with the awareness and understanding of PETs in practice by conducting 20 semi-structured interviews with privacy professionals. Additionally, we conduct two surveys with 67 total participants, quantifying which of the technologies from the literature practitioners consider to be PETs, while also evaluating new definitions that we propose. Our results show that there is little agreement in academia and practice on how the term Privacy-Enhancing Technologies is understood. We conclude that there is much work to be done towards facilitating a common understanding of PETs and their transition from research to practice.

View More Papers

User Attitudes Towards Controls for Ad Interests Estimated On-device...

Florian Lachner, Minzhe Yuan Chen Cheng, Theodore Olsauskas-Warren (Google)

Read More

YuraScanner: Leveraging LLMs for Task-driven Web App Scanning

Aleksei Stafeev (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Tim Recktenwald (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Gianluca De Stefano (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Soheil Khodayari (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Giancarlo Pellegrino (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security)

Read More

Enhancing Security in Third-Party Library Reuse – Comprehensive Detection...

Shangzhi Xu (The University of New South Wales), Jialiang Dong (The University of New South Wales), Weiting Cai (Delft University of Technology), Juanru Li (Feiyu Tech), Arash Shaghaghi (The University of New South Wales), Nan Sun (The University of New South Wales), Siqi Ma (The University of New South Wales)

Read More

Work-in-Progress: Uncovering Dark Patterns: A Longitudinal Study of Cookie...

Zihan Qu (Johns Hopkins University), Xinyi Qu (University College London), Xin Shen, Zhen Liang, and Jianjia Yu (Johns Hopkins University)

Read More