Information for Authors

Note: This information applies to PoPETs 2025 and later.

Submission Guidelines

Note: This information applies to PoPETs 2025 and later.

All submissions to PoPETs must adhere to the submission policies outlined on this page.

We will desk-reject papers that are submitted in violation of the instructions outlined below, have severe editorial problems (broken references, egregious spelling or grammar errors, missing figures, etc.), are outside of the scope for PoPETs, or are deemed clearly of insufficient quality to appear in PoPETs. Such submissions will be desk-rejected without consideration of merit. Appeals to desk rejections will not be considered.

We do not accept email submissions. All papers must be submitted using the submission server. See the current CFP for the correct link for the current volume and issue.

If you have any questions or doubt about any of the submissions policies, email the chairs prior to submission to ask for clarification.

Originality

Unlike journals that publish extended versions of conference papers, PoPETs seeks to publish original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers should describe original, scientifically sound work produced by the co-authors. All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, correctness, and clarity. Submissions should be finished, complete papers.

Paper Format

Submissions must be in PDF format. Submissions must be formatted using this LaTeX template (see LaTeX instructions for more information). Other LaTeX document formats/styles are not allowed. PoPETs does not currently offer an alternative template (e.g., Word Doc).

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.

Page Length

Submissions and resubmissions to PoPETs must consist of at most 12 typeset pages for the main body of the paper. The main body excludes any acknowledgements, the bibliography, and any clearly-marked appendices contained in the submission. Shorter papers are allowed, but submissions exceeding 12 typeset pages for the main body of the paper will be automatically desk-rejected without consideration of appeal.

Note that authors of submissions that receive a "Revise" decision will be allowed one additional main-body page (13 main body pages in total) during the revision process in order to address reviewer feedback. If a submission is accepted, authors will similarly be allowed 13 main-body pages for the final camera-ready paper. This exception does not apply to any rejected paper. See the Revision Rules, Resubmission Rules, and Camera-ready Instructions for further guidance.

There is no page limit for acknowledgements, bibliography, and clearly-marked appendices. However, appendices should only be used to provide supplementary information that falls outside of the stated contribution of the paper or to provide extended details that would not be of interest to most readers. The paper should be complete and self-contained without appendices. PC members are not required to read the appendices during review.

Scope

Papers submitted to PoPETs should present novel practical and/or theoretical research into the requirements, design, analysis, experimentation, or fielding of privacy-enhancing technologies and the social, cultural, legal, or situational contexts in which they are used. PoPETs is also open to interdisciplinary research examining people’s and communities’ privacy needs, preferences, and expectations as long as it is clear how these findings can impact the design, development, or deployment of technology with privacy implications.

Submissions that do not satisfy the scope criteria will be desk-rejected by the chairs or rejected by the program committee. Please consider the following requirements carefully before submitting to PoPETs. Following these guidelines will ensure that your submission passes desk review and receives a full review by the program committee. You may ask the chairs for clarification of scope before the submission deadline.

(1) Privacy enhancing technologies: Submissions must have strong ties to privacy. The paper's relevance to privacy should be strongly motivated, and ties to privacy should be presented throughout the paper. PoPETs is open to topics from the wider area of security and privacy, but authors of submissions must clearly explain how their work serves to improve or understand privacy in technology.

(2) Privacy applications in real systems: Submissions must contribute to real privacy applications that run in real systems. A substantial portion of each submission should be focused on work that is more traditionally considered practical or applied work (e.g., real-world use cases, real-world measurements, evaluation on real-world data, application development, integration with a real-world application, system design and evaluation, etc.).

Special note for theoretical work: Submissions that make primary contributions that are highly theoretical in nature (e.g., to theoretical cryptography and primitives or related areas) have a particularly high risk of being desk-rejected for failure to clearly tie their contributions to privacy enhancing technologies and to privacy applications in real systems. In particular, we expect that submissions should not include proofs as a primary contribution, and thus proofs should usually appear in the Appendix rather than in the main body of submissions. Additionally, evaluations should be included that consider real systems as outlined above. Authors should make a concerted effort to rigorously address both points of scope. This focus is necessary because PoPETs is not well-equipped to review and provide high quality feedback to highly theoretical contributions.

Anonymization of Submissions

All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality and relevance through double-blind reviewing, where the identities of the authors are withheld from the reviewers. As an author, you are required to make a good-faith effort to preserve the anonymity of your submission, while at the same time allowing the reader to fully grasp the context of related past work, including your own. It is recognized that, at times, information regarding the identities of authors may become public outside the submission process (e.g., if a pre-print is published as a technical report or on a pre-print server). The PC will ignore this external information. Minimally, please take the following steps when preparing your submission:

• Remove the names and affiliations of authors from the title page.
• Remove acknowledgment of identifying names and funding sources.
• Remove references to your institution, for example in survey materials or in git repositories.
• Use care in referring to related work, particularly your own. Do not omit references to provide anonymity, as this leaves the reviewer unable to grasp the context. Instead, reference your past work in the third person, just as you would any other piece of related work by another author.

Simultaneous Submission

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. Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism constitute dishonesty or fraud. PoPETs prohibits these practices and may take action against authors who have committed them.

All submitted papers are considered to be under review for PoPETs until authors are notified of a decision by the program committee or the program co-chairs approve a request for withdrawal.

Ethics

Papers should follow the basic principles of ethical research. These principles include, but are not limited to, beneficence (maximizing the benefits to an individual or to society while minimizing harm to the individual), minimal risk (appropriateness of the risk versus benefit ratio), informed consent, respect for privacy, and limited deception. Consider especially the ethical implications of research involving human subjects, user data (e.g. network traffic, passwords, and social network data), and system vulnerabilities (e.g. cryptographic weaknesses, software exploits, and privacy attacks). See the Menlo Report for detailed guidelines on ethical research.

Authors are encouraged to include a subsection on Ethical Principles, and such a discussion may be required if deemed necessary during the review process. This section should include a justification of the ethics of the work and information about whether the work was submitted to an external ethics panel such as an IRB or the Tor Research Safety Board. Research that is deemed to not have met adequate ethical standards may be rejected on those grounds. Authors are encouraged to contact PC chairs before submitting to clarify any doubts.

Use of AI-based tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Copilot)

Papers that use AI-based tools such as ChatGPT or Copilot for writing or writing assistance are required to disclose their use in the acknowledgement section.

• If you verbatim include text generated by an AI-based tool, it should be cited using quotation marks, where the citation should include the prompt used as input to generate the quoted text. An example of such a citation would be “ChatGPT4. Prompt: "what is differential privacy?”, March 20, 2024".
• If you include significantly paraphrased text that was initially generated by an AI-based tool then it should be cited without using quotation marks, where the citation should include the prompt used as input to generate the text that was then significantly paraphrased.
• If you use AI-based tools to revise writing style (e.g., change the text to active voice) or fix typographical issues then you should mention in the acknowledgement section which sections were revised using what kind of instructions or prompts (e.g., "The authors used ChatGPT4 to revise the text in Section 4 to correct any typos, grammatical errors, and awkward phrasing").

Claims of Benefits to Particular Populations

Authors should make clear whether their claims about benefits to a particular user population have been validated in some way (e.g. interviews, literature review, discussions with experts etc.). If authors can't offer such support or validation for their claims about that target community, this should be clearly acknowledged in a limitations section.

Security Proofs

Some papers require lengthy security proofs to support the technical validity of the contribution. These papers should indicate this in the body of the paper and include the proof in the appendix.

Release of Code and Data

To encourage reproducibility, this year PETS will ask the authors to indicate at the time of submission whether the authors plan to release code and data upon acceptance of the paper. If ‘yes’, authors will have the opportunity to provide a link to the code or data at the time of submission. If ‘no’, authors will be asked to provide a brief explanation. A 'no' answer is not a ground for rejection as long as the authors provide a reasonable explanation. Note that this is distinct from the artifact review that takes place after a paper is accepted.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors are asked to indicate conflicts of interest with PC members as part of the online submission process. We consider the following to be clear cases of a conflict:

1. Sharing an institutional affiliation with an author at the time of submission
2. The advisor or advisee of an author at any time in the past
3. A co-author of the author within the past two years or a current collaborator

For other forms of conflict, authors must contact the chairs and explain the perceived conflict. If the chairs do not receive a rationale for the conflict, they will remove this conflict when making reviewing assignments.

Revision Rules

Submissions that receive a "Revise" decision during one of the PoPETs issues will enter our interactive revision process. During interactive revision, the authors will have the opportunity to request clarifications from the revision editor and submit intermediate drafts of improved versions of their paper for additional review and feedback. There is no limit on the number of intermediate drafts that can be submitted during the revision period. Each draft should be submitted alongside a document summarizing the changes made since the previous PoPETs submission (see the Summary of Changes guidelines). See the PoPETs review process for more details.

Papers that have received a decision of "Revise" from PoPETs are still considered to be under review until accepted or rejected by the chairs or program committee; authors must formally withdraw their paper if they wish to submit to another venue.

During the interactive revision process, the authors will be allowed one additional page for the main body of the paper (13 main-body pages in total) in order to address reviewer feedback. If a revision is accepted, then the final, camera-ready version of the paper also must be at most 13 typeset main-body pages in total (with unlimited pages for acknowledgements, bibliography, and clearly-marked appendices). If a revision is rejected, then the revision rules will no longer apply and any future submission to PoPETs would be considered a resubmission.

Resubmission Rules

Authors of rejected papers may consider resubmitting to a future issue of PoPETs, but must skip one full issue before resubmission. For example, papers that are rejected from Issue 1 may not be resubmitted until Issue 3 or later. This policy follows into future volumes as well. For example, papers that are rejected from Issue 3 of Volume 2025 may not be resubmitted until Issue 1 of Volume 2026. This policy enables authors ample time to substantially improve their papers and helps mitigate the overburdening of reviewers.

Papers that are rejected and later resubmitted must include a document summarizing the changes made since the previous PoPETs submission (see the Summary of Changes guidelines). All submission guidelines that apply to initial submissions also apply to resubmissions, including the 12 main-body page limit rules. Additionally, the Revision Rules do not apply to resubmissions.

LaTeX Template Instructions

As specified above, you must use this template.

• There is no need to fill in the values in the Copyright and Issue info sections of the .tex file for submission.
• Teaser figures are allowed, but definitely not required (we expect these to be exceedingly rare).
• Make sure you check the LaTeX output to see if it reports that you are missing packages. (Hint: You may be missing a package called texlive-fonts-extra or similar.)

Example conforming main.tex and submission-template.pdf files are included in the template zip file.

Summary of Changes (Required for Revisions and Resubmissions)

A document summarizing changes is required for all revisions and resubmissions, regardless of the decision received. A resubmission is any paper with content substantially shared by a previous submission to PoPETs that received any reviews, and this includes a revision receiving a Revise decision to be reviewed by a Revision Editor. There is no specific template for the summary of changes, and so you should feel free to draft it in a way that presents your revisions and responses to review points in a clear and concise manner. The document must be a PDF.

Suggestions on what to include in your summary:

1. Include a paragraph or two summarizing the main changes you have made in the revision and how they address the main concerns raised by the reviewers.
2. Respond point-by-point to the issues mentioned in the meta-review. Be clear and explicit in explaining the concerns of the meta-review and how you have addressed them. Also, please point to the sections of the paper where the changes can be found.
3. Mention whether and how you have addressed the other issues raised in the individual reviews (and not included in the meta-review)
4. If there are points in the reviews (and especially the meta-review) that you disagree with, and thus have not addressed, make sure you make a convincing case providing your reasons.
5. Provide information on any other changes you have made to the paper (and not raised in the reviews).
6. Refrain from listing very minor changes (e.g., typos). It’s assumed that you have corrected them.
7. You can also attach a latex diff, if that helps understanding how you have updated your paper (though this is not useful if you have done very heavy editing all over the place).

You are advised to put some effort into writing a summary that makes it easy for reviewers to understand how the new version compares to the old one, how you have addressed reviewer comments, and how the paper has been improved. Expect reviewers to read your summary of changes before they read the new version of the paper, and so you should see it as an opportunity to present the improvements you’ve made during revision. The summary of changes should be anonymized in the same way as the submission.

Copyright and Licensing

Note: This information applies to PoPETs 2025 and later.

Copyright

Papers will be self-published on the PETS/PoPETs website under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Authors retain copyright of their work.

License Agreement

Authors of accepted papers must sign the license agreement. This allows us to distribute your work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. One co-author needs to sign and send this on behalf of all of the authors.

Note: If some, but not all, of the authors are employees of the U.S. federal government, the form must be signed by one of the authors who is not an employee of the U.S. federal government.

Camera-ready Instructions for Accepted Papers

Note: This information applies to PoPETs 2025 and later.

Please follow along with the checklist below. Each step is elaborated below the checklist.

Author camera-ready checklist

1. Format the submission.
2. Embed fonts in any included PDF figures and images.
3. Ensure your paper builds with a recent version of TeX Live.
4. Verify that all fonts are TrueType or Type1.
5. Sign license agreement.
6. Complete the metadata.json file.
7. Prepare your ZIP file submission.
8. Submit your ZIP file to HotCRP.
9. Artifact submission.

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Step 1: Paper Formatting

• Please use this LaTeX template.
• The page limit is 13 pages for the main body and unlimited additional pages for the references and appendices. Note that these page limits apply only to the camera-ready version, and they are an increase over the 12-page limit during submission. Acknowledgments may appear outside of the main-body pages (that is, they can be considered an appendix).
• We use TeX Live 2024 for compilation. Please use a modern version of TeX Live when compiling your paper locally. (As of August 1st 2024, the default Tex Live version used by Overleaf is 2024.)
• Make sure that your main .tex file is named main.tex.
• Make sure that your main.tex file starts with \documentclass[sigconf,balance=false]{acmart}.
• Make sure that the following tags and macros are in main.tex (and not in an external .tex file.) Do not modify these tags.

  	\usepackage{popets}
  	% Copyright
  	\setcopyright{popets}
  	\copyrightyear{YYYY}
  	% Issue info
  	\acmYear{YYYY}
  	\acmVolume{YYYY}
  	\acmNumber{X}
  	\acmDOI{XXXXXXX.XXXXXXX}
  	\acmISBN{}
  	\acmConference{Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies}
  	\settopmatter{printacmref=false,printccs=false,printfolios=true}
  

• Do NOT use the \subtitle{} tag; indexing services will drop the subtitle.
• You do not need to provide values for the \city{}, \state{}, and \country{} commands within the \author{} commands, but YOU MUST leave the blank commands in the file.
• The CCS concept tags ( \begin{CCSXML}... ) should be omitted.
• Make sure to include an Acknowledgment section. The Acknowledgment section should be included using \begin{acks}...\end{acks}.
• Be sure to use the fonts included in the LaTeX template. Do NOT import packages (such as "times") that may change the fonts.
• Avoid margin overflows: text, figures, algorithms, and equations should be confined to double-column margins.
• Be consistent in capitalizing paper titles, section titles, subsection titles, and paragraph titles. Either always use sentence case or always use title case.
  • Sentence case: This is a section title about the European Union and GPUs
  • Title case: This Is a Section Title About the European Union and GPUs
• DO NOT USE ALL CAPS for your \title{}, \section{}, \subsection{}, etc. commands. Do note, however, that the template will render section (but not subsection) headings in full caps.
• Bad breaks: Fix any widows or orphans. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans) Section and subsection headings should have at least 2 lines of text under them before spilling over to the next column.
• PoPETs does not provide editorial services. We recommend you thoroughly proofread your document and consider engaging your own copy editing service.

Funding Source Acknowledgements

All papers must include an acknowledgment section that lists, for all authors, the names of the bodies that funded the research. If no funding supported the research, the section should include the sentence, "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.".

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Step 2: Font embedding

If your paper includes PDF figures that contain text, please ensure that all fonts are embedded into the PDF files you submit.

You may use the following script to embed fonts into a PDF file (we provide this script as-is, without support or warranty.)

Create a script called embedfont with the following contents:

# Usage: ./embedfont file.pdf
# Outputs file.pdf_embed. Make sure it looks good before overwriting original file.pdf

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dPDFX \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=$1_embed -f $1 \
-c quit

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Step 3: Building your paper

Please verify that your paper builds using TeX Live 2024 . Ultimately, we use TeX Live 2024 to compile your paper. If you are using Overleaf, please be sure that TeX Live 2024 is the selected system. Additionally, if you are using Overleaf, please do not ignore compilation errors, as those errors will not be ignored by the PETS compilation system.

Authors are responsible for submitting a zip file that compiles correctly in our environment and follows all of the guidelines on this page. We strongly encourage you to use the Docker image we provide to test your source before submitting your camera-ready zip file. Instructions for using the Docker image are included in README.md in the image zip file. You can use the image on Linux and MacOS, and on Windows with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Dealing with submissions that don't compile in our environment or that otherwise do not comply with the guidelines stated here slows down our publishing process and delays the entire issue.

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Step 4: Verifying fonts

• Once you have a built PDF, please make sure that all of the PDF fonts are TrueType or Type1 and that they are all Embedded and Subset. You can confirm this using one of the following methods:
• Open your PDF in Adobe Reader and go to File > Properties > Fonts and check the listed fonts.

  

• With xpdf installed, run the following command: pdffonts your_pdf_filename

  

If you notice any fonts in your paper that are not TrueType/Type1 Embedded, please review your included figures. Make sure all fonts used are TrueType/Type1 and you embedded the fonts.

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Step 5: Sign the license agreement.

Authors of accepted papers must print, sign, and scan the license agreement. This allows us to distribute your work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. One co-author needs to sign and send this on behalf of all of the authors.

Note: If some, but not all, of the authors are employees of the US federal government, the form must be signed by one of the authors who is not an employee of the US federal government.

Please save the signed license agreement as a PDF file and name it license.pdf.

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Step 6: Complete the metadata file.

The data provided in this file creates the metadata used for indexing your paper. Note: The json file should be included in the final zip file you submit. Please do not submit it separately.

Please download the contents of the JSON file below, fill out the fields correctly, save the file and name it metadata.json .

• Make sure all the required information is provided, and is consistent with the accompanying source file.
• Make sure the abstract in the file does not contain any LaTeX commands or formatting.
• Make sure all the authors’ first names and last names are correct. The JSON file uses UTF-8 encoding to support Unicode characters. Please do not change the encoding.
• Attest to the correctness of the provided information. Put the following sentence in the "attestation" field if everything is correct.
  • I attest that the values in this file are correct and exactly match those in the accompanying pdf file.

Download metadata.json template file (Right click -> "Save as...").

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Step 7: Prepare your ZIP file.

Please create a ZIP archive of your paper's source files. This must contain all your source files so we can build your pdf. Our compiled version is the one that we will publish. We will insert the correct page numbers and DOI. The ZIP archive you create should also contain the signed license form license.pdf and the completed metadata.json file. The final zip should have the following structure:

* paper.zip
  └─ paper/
      ┠─ metadata.json
      ┠─ license.pdf
      ┠─ main.tex
      ┠─ main.bib
      ┠─ ...

Make sure that there is no extra dot in any of your filenames (That is, instead of naming your file image.1.png, name it image_1.png.).

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Step 8: Submitting your ZIP archive.

Please upload your completed ZIP archive into HotCRP. Login to the HotCRP instance where you submitted for review, and once camera-ready documents are being collected, you will see a panel where Final Submission ZIPs can be uploaded. Please upload your final ZIP file in this panel.

After you submit, please monitor your email accounts . After the camera-ready deadline, we will be compiling your submissions. If there are any issues with your submission, we will contact you via email to fix them.

Please respond promptly to emails. If you do not respond to the publication chairs, or if you fail to to provide an error-free zip file that follows the guidelines stated here on time your paper will be pushed to the next issue (or, if necessary, the next volume) of PoPETs.

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Step 9: Artifact Submission

Authors of accepted papers will receive an invitation to submit a corresponding artifact. The deadline for artifact submission is about 3 weeks after the notification of paper acceptance. Artifact reviews are released about 3 weeks after submission. The anticipated finalization of artifacts is before the author notification date for the following issue.

See the artifacts page for more info.