Privacy remains an intractable ethical issue for the information society.Given its complicity, there is a moral obligation to redress privacy issues in systems engineering practice itself. This paper investigates the role the concept of privacy plays in contemporary systems engineering practice. Ontologically a nominalist human concept, privacy is considered from an appropriate engineering perspective:human-centred design. Two human-centred design standards are selected as exemplars of best practice, and are analysed using an existing multi-dimensional privacy model. The findings indicate that the human-centred standards are currently inadequate in dealing with privacy issues. Some implications for future practice are subsequently highlighted.
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