Privacy Enhancement Technologies: A software engineering approach for PET

Privacy is an increasingly important subject for organizations. Nowadays, organizations (unknowingly) process vast amounts of personal data of their customers in numerous different information systems. There are strict legislations regarding the processing of personal data, and from mid-2016, these legislations will only get more strict with the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union. In an approach to ensure compliance with these legislations, different techniques such Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Privacy-by-Design and Privacy Design Strategies were introduced in the past decades. However, these techniques tend to be defined in such a high-level of abstraction that they are hard to use in practice. This paper discusses and explains various software techniques which can help to design information systems that can better protect the privacy of their users. Next, these techniques are combined as a solution named Privacy Management System. This system is able to ensure and enforce full data processing transparency of an organization and should close the gap between the privacy legislations and software development.