Guide to adopting privacy-enhancing technologies

15 Jul 2021 11:00 AM

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation have launched a new website to provide guidance on privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs.

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation have launched a new website to provide guidance on privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs. The aim is to help organisations feels more confident in undertaking data-driven innovation while also protecting the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data. PETs are technical methods that can help achieve this, although CDEI are careful to point out that they are not a silver bullet and cannot be used  in isolation. Rather, they can be adopted alongside broader privacy designs to greatly reduce the risk of sensitive data being disclosed.

The website introduces different kinds of PETs, from what are classified as traditional techniques, including at-rest and in-transit encryption, to emerging techniques which include multi-party computation and federated analytics. In addition, they introduce the application of different PETs through a significant repository of use cases, categorised by sector, stage of implementation and PETs.

Several techUK members are among the case studies. A Privitar pilot in finance is used as example of homomorphic encryption to allow institutions to gather insights about a population from private and public datasets without collecting any identifiable information. Another pilot, carried out by NVIDIA and King’s College London, shows how federated analytics and differential privacy have been used to access data to train a neural network in brain tumour segmentation.

For details on the wider range of PETs, more case studies, and to try out an interactive guide to see which PET might work for your purposes, explore the full Adoption Guide. The site is currently in beta and CDEI will undertake user testing over the autumn. They are looking for feedback, so if you are interested in contributing to this, or if you have an interesting use case for the repository, do get in touch with them on pets@cdei.gov.uk.