Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), which constitute a wide array of technical means for protecting users’ privacy, have gained considerable momentum in both academia and industry. However, existing surveys of PETs fail to delineate what sorts of privacy the described technologies enhance, which in turn makes it difficult to differentiate between the various PETs. Moreover, those surveys could not consider very recent important developments with regard to PET solutions. The goal of this chapter is two-fold. First, we provide an analytical framework to differentiate various PETs. This analytical framework consists of high-level privacy principles and concrete privacy concerns. Secondly, we use this framework to evaluate representative up-to-date PETs, specifically with regard to the privacy concerns they address, and how they address them (i.e., what privacy principles they follow). Based on findings of the evaluation, we outline several future research directions.