An exploratory experiment on privacy patterns: limitations and possibilities

ABSTRACTSeveral1 privacy engineering methods and techniques have built on privacy patterns for materializing the Privacy by Design paradigm. Also, reports by data protection and cybersecurity authorities have recommended them. However, the benefits that their application delivers to the design process, product and developers have still to be demonstrated. This paper describes initial steps in the empirical evaluation of the application of privacy patterns during the design activity. First, we describe an exploratory experiment carried out to analyze the improvement that 12 privacy patterns (for anonymity) bring to the completeness of the design product. Additionally, we show the developer's perception of the privacy patterns after their use. Second, we make an in-depth analysis based on the learnings obtained during the experiment realization. We identify a set of limitations to advance the empirical research on privacy patterns. We analyze these limitations and propose a set of initiatives to overcome them. We also reflect on the type of evaluation we can make in experiments with privacy patterns. Once the limitations are addressed, more exhaustive evaluations may be conducted.