Today, we at The Rise of Privacy Tech (TROPT) publish the TROPT Defining the Privacy Tech Landscape Whitepaper 2021, in which we define privacy technology, pulling from foundational privacy and technology concepts.
Why? Because at this nascent time in the privacy tech industry, the key players—founders, investors, domain experts, and user-buyers—aren’t connected enough to move things forward at the pace the market needs. They’re not on the same chapter—let alone page—in their understanding of privacy or privacy tech. In this foundational whitepaper, we begin to bridge some of the gaps between the industry key players.
We start off by defining privacy tech, which requires understanding privacy. We provide a basic summary of different privacy definitions and conceptualizations. We do this for several reasons. First, we keep observing key players unnecessarily talking past each other as they discuss the emerging privacy tech landscape. Second, this lack of baseline understanding of privacy introduces friction and, in certain contexts, prevents key players from moving forward with a partnership, purchase, investment, or other step towards fueling privacy tech and innovation.
As part of this exercise, we also summarize common privacy principles, introduce TROPT’s own set of privacy tech principles, and explore privacy tech’s relationship with frequently conflated terms like cybersecurity, privacy engineering, privacy by design, privacy enhancing technologies (PETs), and so on.
If you want to dig deeper into these topics, you can download the full TROPT Defining the Privacy Tech Landscape White Paper 2021 here.