Privacy by design in statistics: Should it become a default/standard?

Privacy by design (PbD) as an approach to systems engineering has been conceptualized for more than a decade. It has inspired the legal norm of managing personal data in EU and incorporated into the GDPR. In practice PbD is far from being the standard in systems engineering in both private and publ ic sector procurement. We illustrate why privacy needs to be engineered into statistical systems and explain risk when privacy is patched into a solution. To show how the statistical system could proceed in adopting PbD we bring an example from a high level self assessment of a statistical organization. We walk through future proofing existing services by redesigning an official tourism statistics application that uses mobile location big data. Finally we envision how statistical organizations can cooperate in supporting each other and learn together how to build trust required in utilising new data sources.