Privacy by Design Imaginaries

• In Event: Interrogating Ethics & Values in Technology Design & Engineering Practice

Abstract

The desire to see technology companies address privacy and adjacent social values has been surfaced in new ways, in part due to external regulatory forces (e.g., the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation) as well as internal labor forces (e.g., technology company employees publicly walking out or refusing to work on certain projects). Understanding what these desires, practices, and initiatives look like from the perspective of technology practitioners can provide insight into how technologists work to conceptualize and realize different privacy (or privacies) within their professional, technical, and institutional assemblages. This paper reports on two engagements with user experience designers and engineers working at software companies in the San Francisco Bay Area: a series of interviews, and a design activity creating speculative scenarios related to technologies. These engagements seek to: gain insight into what work engineers and designers do in the name of privacy and adjacent values while navigating within their organizations; exploring the tensions that exist in doing this work; and suggest alternative forms of work practice or organization that designers and engineers may desire. This paper provides a critical investigation of ways in which practices to address privacy and adjacent values are already present in technical practices and corporate organizations, and the opportunities that those practices may both afford and foreclose for address privacy during the design process.

Author

• Richmond Y Wong, University of California, Berkeley