Adopt a PET! An Exploration of PETs, Policy, and Practicalities for Industry in Canada

Privacy is an instance of a social norm formed through legal, technical, and cultural dimensions. Institutions such as regulators, industry, and researchers act as societal agents that both influence and respond to evolving norms. Attempts to promote privacy are often ineffective unless they account for this complexity and the dynamic interactions among these actors. Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) are technical solutions for privacy issues that enable collaborative data analysis, allowing for the development of solutions that benefit society, all while ensuring the privacy of individuals whose data is being used. However, despite increased privacy challenges and a corresponding increase in new regulations being proposed by governments across the globe, a low adoption rate of PETs persists. In this work, we investigate the factors influencing industry's decision-making processes around PETs adoption as well as the extent to which privacy regulations inspire such adoption. We conducted a qualitative survey study with 22 industry participants from across Canada to investigate how businesses in Canada make decisions to adopt novel technologies and how new privacy regulations impact their business processes. Informed by the results of our analysis, we make recommendations for industry, researchers, and policymakers on how to support what each of them seeks from the other when attempting to improve digital privacy protections. By advancing our understanding of what challenges the industry faces, we increase the effectiveness of future privacy research that aims to help overcome these issues.