PEPR '22 Call for Participation

Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association, in cooperation with Future of Privacy Forum.

The 2022 USENIX Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR '22) will take place as a virtual event on June 23–24, 2022. Contingent on the state of the pandemic, attendees will be invited to an in-person reception in the San Francisco Bay Area on the afternoon of Thursday, June 23.

Important Dates

  • Submissions deadline: Thursday, March 10, 2022
  • Notification to presenters: Friday, April 15, 2022
  • Deadline for submitting presentation videos: Tuesday, June 7, 2022

Conference Organizers

Program Co-Chairs

Divya Sharma, Google
Blase Ur, University of Chicago

Program Committee

Chris Clifton, Purdue University
R. Jason Cronk, Enterprivacy Consulting Group
Martin Degeling, Ruhr University Bochum
Damien Desfontaines, Tumult Labs
Giles Douglas, BetterOmics
Steven Englehardt, DuckDuckGo
Vaibhav Garg, Comcast Cable
Maritza Johnson, University of San Diego and Good Research
Sara Jordan
Apu Kapadia, Indiana University
Katharina Koerner, International Association of Privacy Professionals
Kentrell Owens, University of Washington
Aleatha Parker-Wood, Amazon Web Services
Nuria Ruiz, Outschool and Wikipedia Volunteer
Florian Schaub, University of Michigan
Behrooz Shafiee, Shopify
Divya Sharma, Google
Peter Snyder, Brave Software
Jessica Staddon, JPMorgan Chase
Sha Sundaram, Apple
Blase Ur, University of Chicago
Ben Weinshel, Apple
Simone Wu, Google
Tariq Yusuf

Steering Committee

Lorrie Cranor, Carnegie Mellon University
Lea Kissner, Twitter

Overview

The 2022 Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR '22) is a single-track conference focused on designing and building products and systems with privacy and respect for both their users and the societies in which they operate. Our goal is to improve the state of the art and practice of designing for privacy and respect and to foster a deeply knowledgeable community of both privacy practitioners and researchers who collaborate toward that goal.

We view diversity as a key enabler of this goal. Effectively designing for privacy and respect is a challenge in and of itself; attempting this without a range of perspectives is harder still. Thus, we encourage and welcome participation from all employment sectors, racial and ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, genders, disability statuses, ages, and all those other differences which make us richer as humanity.

PEPR '22 is committed to fostering a respectful and collaborative environment.

Call for Participation

PEPR '22 is soliciting proposals for 20-minute original talks, 10-minute short talks, and 45–60 minute panels featuring discussions with 3–5 speakers. (Additional time will be added for Q&A.) The program committee will select talks that best illuminate topics in the fields of practical privacy engineering and building systems that respect their users. PEPR is tilted toward constructive solutions, but also includes the illumination of challenges. We’re interested in talks from both practitioners and researchers about design proposals, research, deployed systems, case studies, and experience reports.

We are particularly interested in talks addressing the following themes:

Talks focused on building. Usability, crypto, and anonymization are all important, but these are only a small slice of what is needed to build for privacy and respect. PEPR is designed to take a comprehensive view, including topics like architecting large-scale systems for reliable and measurable data deletion, end-to-end consent (from the user all the way to infrastructure), data access and handling (how do you grant it, how do you understand it, how do you enforce it, how do you build a system so you can debug without granting too much, etc.), how to do a privacy review (design and code), privacy red-teaming, incident management, root cause analysis and coming full-circle, how to run an engineering-focused privacy program, and many, many, many more. We encourage case studies demonstrating the integration of practical considerations while building in any of these areas. In addition, we encourage talks related to building for a variety of privacy use-cases (e.g., compliance, consumer product innovation, new features).

Talks focused on practice. PEPR focuses on designing for privacy and respect in real-world systems. Everything technical is messier when it hits the real world, but privacy is messier than most because 1) there are a lot of humans and personal information involved; and 2) there are more regulatory and legal requirements than in many other technical fields. We encourage proposals that talk about the intersection of privacy and other fields as we build real world systems (e.g., the intersection of privacy and applied ethics, privacy and security).

Talks focused on applied research. We welcome proposals that focus on different aspects of privacy research that could help influence privacy designs in practice, as well as empirical studies that could be used by practitioners to make either better decisions or a stronger case for privacy engineering. Some examples include research related to privacy user interfaces, adoption/usage of privacy-related tools or features, attitudes and preferences related to privacy, surveys of how frequently various technologies are deployed, rates of compliance/non-compliance, and more.

Talks may include demos, if appropriate. New talks on previously published materials are also welcome. Please note that we do not accept product pitches or product demos.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit talk proposals via the submission form.

If you have any questions, please reach out to pepr22chairs@usenix.org.