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Reader Paths

This page gives a short, ordered reading sequence for five common intents. Follow the path that matches your immediate goal; you can branch to related sections at any point.

I need to choose a PET

You have a real system, a data constraint, and a privacy requirement. You need a shortlist of candidates with reasons to accept or reject each.

  1. What Are PETs? — one-page orientation on what PETs do and do not guarantee.
  2. PET Taxonomy — families, properties, and relationships between PETs.
  3. Choose a PET — the primary guided chooser; answers depend on data movement and adversary.
  4. By Data Movement — filter by where data lives and moves.
  5. By Threat Model — filter by who must not learn what.
  6. Decision Tree — a readable branching checklist to confirm or challenge your shortlist.

I need to design an architecture

You have a PET candidate and need to produce a defensible system design with actors, data flows, trust boundaries, and failure modes.

  1. What Are PETs? — confirm your candidate fits the protection goal.
  2. PET Architectures: Overview — the catalogue of reference architectures.
  3. Pick the architecture closest to your design (for example, FL + Secure Aggregation, MPC Analytics Pipeline, or Confidential RAG).
  4. Threat Models: Overview — map your adversary assumptions to the standard models.
  5. Benchmarks: Overview — decide what to measure before you build.

I need to evaluate a claim

A paper, vendor, or colleague is making a privacy claim. You need to decide whether it is credible and what it actually protects.

  1. Glossary — resolve any terms you are uncertain about.
  2. Evidence Policy — the standard of evidence this guide uses; apply the same bar to external claims.
  3. Claim Register — the live register of tracked claims; check whether the claim has already been assessed.
  4. Threat Models: Overview — identify the adversary the claim assumes and what it does not cover.
  5. By Threat Model — check whether the chosen PET matches the stated threat.

I need a research problem

You want a concrete open problem with a clear gap, current workaround, success criteria, and a plausible first contribution.

  1. Fix My Itch: Overview — the full index of open problems by PET family.
  2. Good First Research Problems — entry-level problems with lower coordination cost.
  3. Industry Pain Points — problems that practitioners have explicitly flagged as blockers.
  4. Benchmarks Needed — measurement gaps where a new benchmark would have high impact.
  5. Browse the PET-specific problem lists (e.g., Federated Learning, Differential Privacy, MPC) to find the family that interests you.

I need evidence from deployments

You want to understand how a PET has performed in production, what the maturity level is, and what caveats remain unresolved.

  1. Evidence Policy — understand how deployment evidence is graded before reading the entries.
  2. Deployments: Overview — the full index of deployment write-ups, filtered by domain.
  3. Browse by domain: Healthcare, Finance, Advertising, Public Sector.
  4. Claim Register — cross-reference specific deployment claims that are under review.
  5. Benchmarks: Scorecards — compare deployments on privacy, utility, and cost dimensions.