🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the practical adoption barriers of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs), which stem from their technical complexity and the fragmentation among engineering, legal, and business perspectives. To bridge these disciplinary divides, the paper innovatively integrates multidisciplinary viewpoints into a systematic requirements engineering framework. By formally modeling and specifying the diverse needs of developers, integrators, and adopters, the proposed approach effectively aligns cross-domain concerns. The resulting requirements engineering–driven framework not only fills a critical gap in multidisciplinary collaboration for PET deployment but also substantially enhances the efficiency and regulatory compliance of integrating PETs into software systems.
📝 Abstract
In recent decades, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have been recognized as a means of meeting regulatory and user privacy requirements in software systems that process personal data. Despite substantial research efforts, support from regulators, contributions by large technology companies such as Google and Microsoft, and growing interest among software practitioners, the practical adoption of PETs remains limited. Existing research consistently identifies recurring challenges to PETs adoption in SE, such as technical complexity and insufficient training. Despite ongoing research efforts, these challenges largely remain unresolved in practice.
In this industrial challenge paper, we apply a practical, requirements engineering (RE)-driven perspective to examine challenges to PET adoption across multiple stakeholder groups (PET developers, integrators, and adopters) as well as across different disciplinary perspectives (engineering, law, and business).
We argue that RE can facilitate the adoption of PETs by systematically addressing each of the complementary engineering, business, and legal viewpoints on privacy. Neglecting challenges in any of these viewpoints (e.g., the impact of PETs on software architecture, their business implications, and their contribution to regulatory compliance) can increase the impediments or even lead to implementation failure. In practice, explicit specification of these viewpoints within RE can enable meaningful coordination among stakeholders to more effectively realize the benefits of PETs in software engineering.