Cybernetica and Positium help to analyse sensitive data in Indonesia

Cybernetica and Positium collaborated with the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism to calculate accurate statistics on current visitors by comparing cross-roaming share between mobile network operators. Analysis of data was made possible by Sharemind HI, a new offering of Cybernetica that uses Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) technology.

Timely and accurate statistics on cross-border tourism can prove difficult to attain due to various reasons, including privacy and confidentiality barriers if roaming information from telecom companies
is used. "Our aim was to apply privacy-preserving technologies to mobile location data, to overcome the privacy and security barriers, which ultimately results in better data quality," said Baldur Kubo, account manager at Cybernetica. The pilot that took place in late 2018, uses Positium mobile location data analytics and Sharemind HI to enable calculations on encrypted data.

Indonesia, led by the vision of the Ministry of Tourism, is one of the first countries in the world to use data from mobile network operators for measuring cross-border tourism activity. Positium has already set up a system for the Ministry based on data from the biggest mobile operator. Erki Saluveer, CEO of Positium, said “the Ministry wanted to establish a true baseline for roaming market share, which is hard to estimate due to subscribers cross-roaming in different operators’ network during a single visit. Cybernetica’s solution allowed us to compare data without sharing it, overcoming one of the most perplexing issues in our field.”

The project provided the Ministry of Tourism information on roaming counts and roamer overlap between the biggest telecom providers in Indonesia, effectively allowing to calculate real roaming market share.
This information is important input into calculation of tourism more accurately in Indonesia.

"We were honored to participate in this initiative together with our partner, Positium, to be able to tackle real-life problems that have nation-wide impacts. Better data helps make better decisions, as was proven in this project as well. The success of this pilot project can open new avenues for mobile location data, as we continue to explore the possibilities for expansion this year," Kubo said.

Sharemind HI uses Intel SGX technology to help create Trusted Execution Environments (TEE’s). Sharemind HI fully utilizes the three key concepts that Intel SGX provides to help protect the data - enclaves, attestation and data sealing.