Observability in Privacy Infrastructure: Building Trustworthy and Compliant Software Systems at Scale

Abstract

In the age of growing data regulations and user privacy expectations, traditional monitoring techniques fall short when applied to privacy-first systems. This talk explores the critical role of observability in modern privacy infrastructure—enabling real-time insights into data flows, consent propagation, and compliance enforcement across large-scale distributed architectures.

Drawing from real-world experience at Meta and insights from building privacy-aware systems serving billions of users, we will dive into:

• Why observability is non-negotiable in today’s privacy landscape
• Core pillars: logs, metrics, traces — redefined for privacy-first engineering
• Key use cases including purpose limitation enforcement, anomaly detection, and audit automation
• Scalable architecture patterns for event-driven lineage, cryptographic audit trails, and policy-aware data tagging
• System design challenges with handling petabytes of sensitive data under strict SLAs
• Case studies on building observability for 1000+ data pipelines with automated compliance verification
• Quantified impact on audit readiness, fine reduction, and system reliability

Attendees will walk away with a blueprint for embedding observability into their privacy stack—enabling accountable, auditable, and ethically sound data systems.