PETS 2026
Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium
(https://petsymposium.org/2026/)
Calgary, Canada
Conference Dates
7/20/26 - 7/25/26
Submission Dates
PETS 2026 has four submission deadlines (quarterly issues):
Issue 1
Paper Submission: 5/31/25
Issue 2
Paper Submission: 8/31/25
Issue 3
Paper Submission: 11/30/25
Issue 4
Paper Submission: 2/28/26
Note: All deadlines are 23:59:59 Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12). Papers
are published in the journal Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing
Technologies (PoPETs). In-person attendance is strongly encouraged but
not strictly required for publication.
Call for Papers (Full Text)
26th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2026)
July 20-25, 2026
Calgary, Canada
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
held in Calgary, Canada, 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.
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)
Issue 1
Paper submission deadline: 5/31/25 (firm)
Rebuttal period: 7/11/25 - 7/17/25
Author notification: 8/1/25
Revision deadline: 9/1/25
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: 9/15/25
Issue 2
Paper submission deadline: 8/31/25 (firm)
Rebuttal period: 10/10/25 - 10/16/25
Author notification: 11/1/25
Revision deadline: 12/1/25
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: 12/15/25
Issue 3
Paper submission deadline: 11/30/25 (firm)
Rebuttal period: 1/12/26 - 1/19/26
Author notification: 2/1/26
Revision deadline: 3/1/26
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: 3/15/26
Issue 4
Paper submission deadline: 2/28/26 (firm)
Rebuttal period: 4/10/26 - 4/16/26
Author notification: 5/1/26
Revision deadline: 6/1/26
Camera-ready deadline for accepted papers and accepted revisions: 6/15/26
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.
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. Submissions
must provide substantial evidence of this contribution, for example,
by dedicating a substantial portion of the submission to work that is
traditionally considered practical or applied (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) are not
directly out of scope. But they have a particularly high risk of being
desk-rejected if they do not clearly tie their contributions to
privacy enhancing technologies and to privacy applications in real
systems. This applies in particular to papers that include proofs as a
primary contribution (when they are not a primary contribution, proofs
should usually appear in the Appendix). Evidence of ties to real
systems can come in many forms, but a particularly preferred one is an
evaluation of the theoretical contribution in the context of real
systems as outlined above. Authors should make a concerted effort to
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 without relation to real applications
with privacy implications.
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
Bailey Kacsmar, University of Alberta
Ryan Henry, University of Calgary Email: gc26@petsymposium.org
Program Chairs/Co-Editors-in-Chief
Gunes Acar, Radboud University
Rob Jansen, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Email:
pets26-chairs@petsymposium.org
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)
Awards
Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies
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
The Andreas Pfitzmann PETS 2026 Best Student Paper Award is given to
papers written solely or primarily by a student who is invited to
present the work to PETS 2026.
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 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.