  This paper outlines an approach for IEEE to take leadership for digital
privacy to align many existing IEEE Societies and efforts in the areas of
computer systems & applications security, organizational & global
architectures, policy-supporting legislation, originating new standards,
integrating compliance into technologies, and helping design decision-board
infrastructures for governance bodies. Much of the current emphasis on evolving
privacy technologies centers on big corporate enterprises and institutions,
causing the industry to support corporate assets protection mainly. Fostering
technology to empower individual privacy-enabling tools has lagged, and
personal privacy has diminished because corporate big data applications have
made sizable investments into exploiting private data. As one of the largest
individual-member-based organizations, IEEE is urged to develop a collaborative
approach for digital privacy with privacy-enabling technologies to benefit its
members. The recommendations outlined define a prospective course that could
result in future global individualized privacy capabilities which employ a
combination of synergistic technologies such as distributed ledgers,
differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure distributed multi-party
computation, zero-trust architectures, proof-of-origin of data, software, or
other techniques. Such an effort would involve community engagement and
outreach, academic peer-review events, the establishment of governance bodies,
coordination & expansion of existing standards, and the development of
publicly-accessible prototypes. Collaboration with other IEEE-sponsored efforts
for transactive energy systems, confidentiality and security of healthcare
records and devices, and other IEEE-funded projects will help magnify digital
privacy investments already in progress in these applications of emerging
technologies.
