PbD, The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto and Privacy Engineering

Had quite a bit of time to rereview the relationship between the foundational principles of PbD, the excellent book Privacy Engineer's Manifesto and my Privacy Engineering book. To me this is how it looks and finally I think we're starting to see a proper balance between these.

The seven foundational principles of Privacy by Design are well known throughout the privacy community and together they stand as an ideal focus for the development of privacy over our information systems as the Agile Manifesto did for software development processes.

1.  Proactive not Reactive; Preventative not Remedial
2.  Privacy as the Default Setting
3.  Privacy Embedded into Design
4.  Full Functionality – Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum
5.  End-to-End Security – Full Lifecycle Protection
6.  Visibility and Transparency – Keep it Open
7.  Respect for User Privacy – Keep it User-Centric

As time has shown misunderstanding and incorrectly applying the prinicples of the Agile Manifesto has lead to severe development problems and technical debt.


One only needs to look at the modern application of the term agile to understand that its original meaning in many cases has been lost; such is the danger facing the principles of Privacy By Design and even now statements such as 'We Follow PbD Princples' are abound without any underpinning or engineering understanding of those principles in either code or process.

To move forward we must precisely understand how these principles can be integrated not just in to policies, but engineering requirements, design requirements, test cases, software development processes, analysis tools, development tools and even the very psyche of software engineering. Efforts such as the Privacy Engineer's Manifesto take the first step in addressing these aspects and the relationship between PbD.

However working from a purely top-down perspective does not solve all problems, but one needs to work simultaneous bottom-up from basic engineering and deeper theoretical perspectives and ensure that both directions of thought complement, balance and produce a consistent whole. We take the bottom-up approach here and do not attempt to define precise processes but rather present ontologies, structures and tools which can be adapted as local development practices require and dictate.