S c o p e

The Journal of Privacy Technology is a refereed online journal published by the Center for Privacy Technology within the Institute for Software Research International, a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Journal was formed because of a perception by the editors that no forum existed in which papers exploring the technology aspects of privacy were published with regularity.

The term "privacy" encompasses many distinct concepts, including communications privacy, bodily privacy, freedom from intrusion, anonymity and data privacy. The low cost and ubiquity of computers and the Internet has resulted in an unparalleled opportunity both to violate and to enhance human privacy in all of its listed forms. The rate at which new developments have eroded privacy is difficult to fathom, and such problems as identity theft, spam and international terrorism have necessarily spurred legislators and policy makers to turn their attention to such topics. Published research in privacy technology, which ought to inform policy and regulatory discussions, has not been able to keep pace. In part this occurs because research is time-consuming, but also because delays in ordinary print publication can exceed the useful lifetime of a privacy issue. The fact that no publication forum exists for papers on privacy technology also means that researchers in disparate application areas who encounter the same foundational problems in privacy have no effective way to share their insights, and the search for commonality among such problem is inhibited. The Journal was established to alleviate these difficulties.

In general, it is useful to view the privacy domain as a competition between privacy-invading privacy-enhancing technologies. For example, a video surveillance camera, despite its possible effect of enhancing security, is nonetheless viewed as a privacy-invading technology. A chip in the camera that de-identifies or encrypts human faces is a privacy-enhancing technology. The question whether such a chip can be built and whether it can perform its job effectively is a problem in privacy technology.

In an ideal world, privacy would be infringed only to the extent necessary to effectuate policies having higher social priority than privacy. For example, in the United States the need to enforce the criminal laws permits the police to invade one's home (and data) if an appropriate warrant has been obtained. Until recently, private citizens have not had at their disposal the tools to make large-scale privacy invasions of their own. While it may be possible to circumscribe the activities of the police through legal means (by, for example, making illegally-obtained evidence inadmissible), it is impossible to enforce by similar means restrictions on the activities of private citizens. It is therefore imperative, if we are to retain any privacy rights at all, to provide effective technological means to counter the powerful capabilities of privacy-invading technologies. This cannot be done without a thorough exploration of the capabilities, both good and bad, of these technologies. The primary purpose of the Journal of Privacy technology is to promote these important investigations.