Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR)
What is PEPR?
The Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR) was established in 2019 and is one of the best conferences for privacy engineers and other privacy practitioners. In the conference organizers' own words:
PEPR is focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for their users and the societies in which they operate. Our goal is to improve the state of the art and practice of building for privacy and respect and to foster a deeply knowledgeable community of both privacy practitioners and researchers who collaborate towards that goal (PEPR 2020).
PEPR allows you to learn about cutting-edge developments in privacy, learn from hands-on technical papers from industry and academia, and be part of a growing community of practice of privacy practitioners. The speakers have a long history of solving privacy problems before privacy engineering as a discipline even existed, and have a wealth of knowledge to share. What's not to love?
The attendees at PEPR are a small (but growing!) community that is open, accepting, candid, and eager to engage with one another. During COVID-19, PEPR transitioned seamlessly (thank you conference organizers!) to the online format and the Slack channels came alive with refrains like ♬ hashing is not anonymization ♬.
Personally, it is one of my favorite privacy conferences.
What Topics Are Covered?
Since 2019, PEPR has covered a number of topics including data governance, privacy-preserving data analysis, design, product privacy, privacy-preserving technologies, incidents, frameworks and risks, consent, ethics, data deletion, healthcare privacy, architectures for privacy, privacy at scale, privacy for vulnerable populations—well, you get the idea.
Put simply, PEPR covers the fundamental and practical topics to help you be an effective privacy practitioner.
If you're interested in hearing from privacy practitioners that are solving difficult and novel privacy problems I highly recommend you check out future PEPR conferences. While you wait for the next PEPR conference, check out the Conference Recaps for PEPR 2020 and 2021!
Conference Recaps
Attending conferences (virtual or in-person) takes a substantial amount of time, energy, focus, diligence, and is taxing and draining even for the best of us. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an overwhelming proliferation of online conferences, webinars, and video calls vying for your attention.
Like many other conferences, PEPR shifted to an online format for PEPR 2020 and PEPR 2021. This means the conference talks were recorded and made available to the public—yay! However, while the shift to online formats has been great for the availability of content, it makes understanding, retaining, and reflecting on this content more difficult.
While PEPR talks are generally 20 minutes in length, there are ~21 talks per year across various conference tracks resulting in ~7 hours of content per year. I'm reducing the burden of catching up on and reviewing PEPR's fantastic content by providing easily-referencable conference recaps for your favorite PEPR talks.
The recaps listed below help you select the topics and talks that are interesting and useful to you!
- Data Governance (2020)
- Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis (2020)
- Design (2020, 2021)
- Product Privacy (2020)
- Privacy-Preserving Technologies (2020)
- Incidents (2020)
- Frameworks and Risk (2020)
- Privacy at Scale (2021)
- Consent (2021)
- Data Deletion (2021)
- Healthcare Privacy (2021)
- Architectures for Privacy (2021)
- Privacy for Vulnerable Populations (2021)
Wrapping Up
If you liked this post (or have ideas on how to improve it), I'd love to know as always. Cheers!
