“Privacy enhancing technologies can be used to build a secure data space that links the data from multiple sources in the private or public sector and prepares the transaction.”
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs for short) are technical measures, products, or services that protect privacy by** eliminating or reducing personally identifiable information** (PII) or by preventing unnecessary and/or undesired processing of PII, all without losing the functionality of the system being built.
In 2023, Cybernetica’s secure multi-party computation (MPC) technology Sharemind MPC was used to exchange medical data in cross-border clinical trial in Germany and Italy, with full ethical and regulatory confirmations. As the paper says – this is a breakthrough- especially as Europe is moving towards data spaces and cross-European collaboration. PETs like MPC will enable cross-organisation and cross-government data use.
Everybody can make predictions like this, so actions do speak louder than words. In 2024, Cybernetica started working on the Joint On-demand COmputation with No Data Exchange (JOCONDE) project for Eurostat, based on MPC technology. This lets statistical organisations of the world securely collaborate on data, sharing insights driving governmental decisions. Of course, the technology is not restricted to governments – in the ShareSat project, we are demonstrating the use of MPC for secure processing of data among companies who are satellite owners and space object catalogue keepers.
In data partnerships, we protect the confidentiality of data collected from people and businesses indirectly. In the future, we see PETs empowering the users directly, providing them controls for transparency and intervenability. Going one step further, PETs can securely offer services personalised according to data collected about the user.
This is a problem that e-governments embracing data and AI will soon need to solve, especially if they want to start offering proactive or event services. For example, to tailor a citizen’s welfare grant based on their income or actual costs, the granting agency will need access to lots of high-quality source data they may not have at hand. Privacy enhancing technologies can be used to build a secure data space that links the data from multiple sources in the private or public sector and prepares the transaction. Cybernetica has demonstrated, how a driver can protect their GPS data in highway taxation and vehicle subsidy use cases and has published the technology in open source form.
Finally, it is unlikely that a government can figure out all the clever uses of the public sector data on its own. Researchers and industry may build services on open data, if given the chance. However, personal data has remained hard to use in open data services, as many deidentification technologies can be broken, if one can access additional information or large amounts of time. The solution is either in providing rate-limited open data as a service over an API or the use of mathematically strict data deidentification technology. Here, Cybernetica will have news to share in 2025.