Privacy and anonymity are increasingly important in the online world. Corporations, governments, and other organizations are realizing and exploiting their power to track users and their behavior. Approaches to protecting individuals, groups, but also companies and governments, from profiling and censorship include decentralization, encryption, distributed trust, and automated policy disclosure.

The 12th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium addresses the design and realization of such privacy services for the Internet and other data systems and communication networks by bringing together anonymity and privacy experts from around the world to discuss recent advances and new perspectives.

The symposium seeks submissions from academia and industry presenting novel research on all theoretical and practical aspects of privacy technologies, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems. We encourage submissions with novel technical contributions from other communities such as law, business, and data protection authorities, that present their perspectives on technological issues. As in the past, the proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, and will be available at the event.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

•Anonymous communications and publishing systems
•Attacks on privacy and privacy technologies
•Censorship resistance
•Data protection technologies
•Economics of privacy and PETs
•Fielded systems and techniques for enhancing privacy in existing systems
•Location privacy
•Privacy and anonymity in Peer-to-Peer, Cloud, and Ubiquitous Computing Environments
•Privacy and inference control in databases
•Privacy-enhanced access control or authentication/certification
•Privacy-friendly payment mechanisms for PETs and other services
•Privacy in Online Social Networks
•Privacy policy languages and tools
•Privacy threat models
•Profiling and data mining
•Pseudonyms, identity management, linkability, and reputation
•Reliability, robustness and abuse prevention in privacy systems
•Traffic analysis
•Transparency enhancing tools
•Usability issues and user interfaces for PETs
General Chair:
Carmela Troncoso, KU Leuven (gc12@petsymposium.org)
Program Chairs:
Simone Fischer-Hübner, Karlstad University (pets2012-chairs@petsymposium.org)
Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington (pets2012-chairs@petsymposium.org)
Local Arrangements Chair:
Fernando Pérez-González, University of Vigo
Program Committee:
TBD
HotPETs chairs:
Julien Freudiger, EPFL
Emiliano De Cristofaro, PARC
Papers to be submitted to the PET Symposium must be at most 20 pages. Submission of shorter papers is strongly encouraged whenever appropriate. Papers must conform to the Springer LNCS style (in which the text area per page is a little smaller than 5" x 7 3/4"). Follow the "Information for Authors" link at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Papers not following these instructions risk being rejected without consideration of their merits.

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.

Reviewers of submitted papers are not required to read the appendices and the paper should be intelligible without them. The paper should start with the title and an abstract. The introduction should give some background and summarize the contributions of the paper at a level appropriate for a non-specialist reader. Submitted papers must not be anonymized. Proceedings will be published by Springer and made available at the symposium.

By submitting a paper, you agree that if it is accepted, you will sign a paper distribution agreement allowing for publication, and also that an author of the paper will register for the symposium and present the paper there. Our current working agreement with Springer is that authors will retain copyright on their own works while assigning an exclusive 3-year distribution license to Springer. Authors may still post their papers on their own Web sites. See http://petsymposium.org/2010/2010-springer-form.pdf for the 2010 version of this agreement.

Paper submissions must be received by February 20, 2012, 23:59 UTC (7pm EST) through the PETS 2012 EasyChair submission server at https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=pets2012. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by April 2nd, 2012 and authors will have the opportunity to revise their papers for the proceedings version due on April 30th, 2012.

HotPETs
As with the last several years, part of the symposium will be devoted to HotPETs –the hottest, most exciting research ideas still in a formative state. See the HotPETs CFP for more information.

Panels
We also invite proposals of up to 2 pages for panel discussions or other relevant presentations. In your proposal, (1) describe the nature of the presentation and why it is appropriate to the symposium, (2) suggest a duration for the presentation (ideally between 45 and 90 minutes), (3) give brief descriptions of the presenters, and (4) indicate which presenters have confirmed their availability for the presentation if it is scheduled. Submit your proposal in the same manner as a PET Symposium paper, by the same deadline. The program committee will consider presentation proposals along with other symposium events, and will respond by the paper decision date with an indication of its interest in scheduling the event. The proceedings will contain 1-page abstracts of the presentations that take place at the symposium. Each contact author for an accepted panel proposal must prepare and submit this abstract in the Springer LNCS style by the "PETS camera-ready deadline for proceedings" deadline date.