Privacy Engineering Domains

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Privacy Engineering Domains

This is a multipart series intended to provide privacy professionals with an overview of privacy engineering domains.


Last updated: December 2023


Privacy engineering is a critically important discipline in the privacy community. It involves applying systematic, scientific or methodological approaches to include privacy requirements in the design, development and operations of systems and services in various domains, including software development, system design, data science, physical architecture, process design, information technology infrastructure and human-computer interaction/user experience design.

These resources are intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of and collaboration within the increasingly important field of privacy engineering.

The first chart in the series defines privacy engineering and each subsequent chart gives an illustrative overview of some privacy engineering domains, highlighting key responsibilities, skills and organizational governance. The upcoming charts in the series are listed here.

Defining Privacy Engineering

This chart provides a broad definition of privacy engineering and highlights various domains in which privacy engineers can significantly impact the protection of privacy.

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IT infrastructure architect

This chart focuses on IT infrastructure architects, whose responsibilities include developing IT infrastructure to ensure data flows between systems have data-use controls in place.

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Software developer/engineer

This chart focuses on software developers and engineers, who assist in ensuring software meets organizational compliance requirements and security objectives.

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Coming Soon

Listed below are the upcoming charts to be published in this series.

  • Data science
  • HBU/UX Design
  • Physical architecture
  • Process design
  • System design