Call for Papers

The annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) brings together experts from around the world to present and discuss recent advances and new perspectives on research in privacy technologies. The 26th PETS is expected to be a hybrid event with a physical gathering (location TBD) and a concurrent virtual event. Papers undergo a journal-style reviewing process, and accepted papers are published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs). Authors of accepted papers are strongly encouraged to attend and present at the physical event, where their presentations can be recorded for the virtual event and where they can participate directly in in-person research, technical, and social activities. However, in-person attendance is not strictly required for publication in the proceedings.

PoPETs, a scholarly, open-access journal for research papers on privacy, provides high-quality reviewing and publication while also supporting the successful PETS community event. PoPETs is self-published and does not have article processing charges or article submission charges.

Authors can submit papers to PoPETs four times a year, every three months, and are notified of the decisions about two months after submission. Authors will receive a decision of accept, revise, or reject. Those receiving revise will be invited to revise their article with the guidance of a revision editor according to a well-defined set of revision criteria and will have up to four months to attempt to complete the required revisions. Authors of rejected papers must skip a full issue prior to resubmission. Please see the review process page for more information.

Submission Guidelines

The submission guidelines contain important submission information for authors. Please note especially the instructions for anonymizing submissions, for ensuring ethical research, and for using AI in writing or editing the manuscript. Papers must be submitted via the PETS 2026 submission server. The submission URL is: https://submit.petsymposium.org/.

Important Dates for PETS 2026

All deadlines are 23:59:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12)

Author Rebuttals (Changes for 2026)

As in previous years, the authors will have a chance to rebut/answer reviewer concerns/questions through a short rebuttal phase. Reviewers are asked to take the rebuttals into consideration during the discussion. New for 2026: The authors will be able to submit a separate, 250-word rebuttal response to each individual review (rather than a single response that addresses all reviews).

Revision Process

Authors who are invited to revise their submissions will be provided with a set of revision criteria that must be satisfactorily completed before their paper can be accepted. Authors of such papers will not resubmit to the next issue, but will instead be assigned a revision editor who will guide the revision process by interactively reviewing new versions of the paper and providing feedback and guidance on the changes necessary for acceptance. Authors will be instructed to propose a revision schedule that is agreeable to the revision editor. Authors may complete the necessary changes as soon as it is practical but no later than four months following the author notification deadline. Revisions that are accepted by the revision editor within 1 month of the author notification will appear in that issue, while revisions that are accepted by the revision editor between 1-4 months of the author notification will appear in the following issue. Not all papers that receive a revise decision will be accepted: papers that do not adequately incorporate the required revisions by the following issue's revision deadline will be rejected. Please see the review process page for more information.

Resubmission of Rejected Papers

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 2026 may not be resubmitted until Issue 1 of Volume 2027. This policy enables authors ample time to substantially improve their papers and helps mitigate the overburdening of reviewers.

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.

Please follow the guidelines given below to 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.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

• Anonymous communication and censorship resistance
• Blockchain privacy
• Building and deploying privacy-enhancing systems
• Cloud computing and privacy
• Compliance with privacy laws and regulations
• Cryptographic tools for privacy
• Data protection technologies
• Defining and quantifying privacy
• Differential privacy and private data analysis
• Economics and game-theoretical approaches to privacy
• Forensics and privacy
• Genomic and medical privacy
• Human factors, usability, and user-centered design of privacy technologies
• Information leakage, data correlation, and abstract attacks on privacy
• Interdisciplinary research connecting privacy to economics, law, psychology, etc.
• Internet of Things privacy
• Location privacy
• Machine learning and privacy
• Measurement of privacy in real-world systems
• Mobile devices and privacy
• Policy languages and tools for privacy
• Profiling and data mining
• Social network privacy
• Surveillance
• Traffic analysis
• Transparency, fairness, robustness, and abuse in privacy systems
• Web privacy

We also solicit Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) papers on any of these topics: papers putting together existing knowledge under some common light (adversary model, requirements, functionality offered, etc.), providing novel insights, identifying research gaps or challenges to commonly held assumptions, etc. Survey papers, without such contributions, are not suitable. SoK submissions should include "SoK:" in their title and check the corresponding option in the submission form.

General Chair (gc26@petsymposium.org)

TBD, TBD

Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief (pets26-chairs@petsymposium.org)

Gunes Acar, Radboud University

Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Vice Program Chairs/Associate Editors-in-Chief

Diogo Barradas, University of Waterloo

Kevin Gallagher, NOVA LINCS, NOVA School of Science and Technology

Sepideh Ghanavati, University of Maine

Marc Juarez, University of Edinburgh

Pierre Laperdrix, CNRS

Rishab Nithyanand, University of Iowa

Simon Oya, University of British Columbia

Tobias Pulls, Karlstad University

Sandra Siby, New York University

Christine Utz, Radboud University

Desk Review Chair

Carmela Troncoso, EPFL

Program Committee/Editorial Board:

TBD

Infrastructure Chairs

Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project

Ian Goldberg, University of Waterloo

Artifact Review
PoPETs reviews and publishes digital artifacts related to its accepted papers. This process aids in the reproducibility of results and allows others to build on the work described in the paper. Artifact submissions are requested from authors of all accepted papers, and although they are optional, we strongly encourage you to submit your artifacts for review.

Possible artifacts include (but are not limited to):

• Source code (e.g., system implementations, proof of concepts)
• Datasets (e.g., network traces, raw study data)
• Scripts for data processing or simulations
• Machine-generated proofs
• Formal specifications
• Build environments (e.g., VMs, Docker containers, configuration scripts)

Artifacts are evaluated by the artifact review committee. The committee evaluates the artifacts to ensure that they provide an acceptable level of utility, and feedback is given to the authors. Issues considered include software bugs, readability of documentation, and appropriate licensing. After your artifact has been approved by the committee, we will accompany the paper link on petsymposium.org with a link to the artifact along with an artifact badge so that interested readers can find and use your artifact.

Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
You are invited to submit nominations for the 2026 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (TBD). The Caspar Bowden PET award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technologies. It is awarded at PETS and carries a cash prize as well as a physical award statue. Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination. However, the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop with proceedings published in the period from April 1, 2025 until March 30, 2026.

Andreas Pfitzmann Best Student Paper Award
A winner of the Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2026 Best Student Paper Award will be selected at PETS 2026. Papers written solely or primarily by a student who is presenting the work to PETS 2026 are eligible for the award.

Artifact Award
A winner of the PETS 2026 Artifact Award will be announced at PETS 2026. Artifacts for papers accepted to PETS 2026 are eligible for the award.

HotPETs and FOCI
A part of the symposium will be devoted to HotPETs — the "hottest," most exciting research ideas still in a still in a formative state — and FOCI, a workshop showcasing the latest results from the Free and Open Communication on the Internet community. Further information will be published on the PETS website in early 2026.