A Systematic Mapping Study of Privacy by Design in Software Engineering

Protecting the personal data contained in current software systems is a complex issue that requires legal regulations and constraints that can be used to manage personal data, along with methodological support with which to develop software systems that will safeguard their respective users’ data privacy. The Privacy by Design (PbD) approach has, therefore, been proposed in order to address this issue and has been applied to systems development in a variety of application domains. The aim of this work is to determine the presence of PbD and the extent to which it exists in software development efforts. A systematic mapping study was conducted in order to identify relevant literature that collects PbD goals in software development, in addition to methods and/or practices that support privacy aware software development. Of the 49 papers selected, 30 address PbD from a theoretical perspective. The majority of the contributions (34) were categorized as being software requirements and software design. The main privacy goal discussed in the primary papers is data minimization. The findings suggest that PbD in software engineering is still an immature field and that there is a need for privacy-aware approaches for software engineering and their validation in industrial settings.