Promoting privacy-enhancing solutions for trustworthy use of data

Driven by lockdown policies, organisations and individuals across the globe sought online alternatives for many of their offline activities, leading to a surge in online traffic, and increased tracking by commercial and public websites. With the world placing a greater reliance on technology, cybercrimes also reported a steady increase, with cyberattacks on user privacy becoming complex. With ever-increasing data complexities and threats, organisations must step up privacy measures and recovery strategies by exploring unique solutions for maintaining data privacy.

Across the globe, CXOs today are focusing a lot more on including privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) as part of their strategic discussions on data collaboration. A broad range of technologies – hardware and software, PETs offer businesses the ability to accelerate safe data collaboration, build customer intelligence, and maximise data value without compromising consumer privacy.

Do they solve everything?

The broad applicability of Privacy Enhancing Technologies is one of the most intriguing elements about them. While they are primarily a collection of technologies that enable, preserve, and enhance data privacy, they may be used in various ways –right from securing sensitive assets during processing to allowing secure access to third-party datasets to reducing the risk of insider threats.  Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and increased customer awareness around digital rights have made it imperative for governments and private companies to create frameworks including PETs. In fact, Gartner named privacy-enhancing computation as one of the top strategic technology trends for 2021 and predicts that by 2025, 50% of large organisations will adopt PETs.

While PETs cover a range of technologies, from relatively simple ad-blocking browser extensions to anonymous communication through new networks, they can be divided into two main categories: traditional and emerging.

Emerging PETs - A development to the Traditional framework

Traditional PETs are well-established privacy techniques. They use de-identification and encryption techniques like tokenisation and k-anonymity. But immediate and emerging threats like re-identifying anonymised data through proxy variables and data mining techniques threaten traditional PETs. Therefore, familiarity with cyber security and traditional PETs offers little help in securing data. Emerging PETs, a group of novel solutions to privacy challenges in modern data-driven systems, are a development in the space of traditional PET systems. They enable deriving higher value from data to achieve digital security through a system of technologies like homomorphic encryption (HE), differential privacy, and federated data processing.

These new techniques, including differential privacy, are achieved when an adversary cannot differentiate between outputs derived from randomised data with noise and the entire comprehensive dataset. A trusted method deployed in the Chrome browser seven years ago is still used in Google Maps, Assistant, and Google Play.

The adoption curve for PETs

As new and different attack vectors emerge, more businesses are adopting Zero Trust methods built on the presumption that systems have been compromised. Privacy Enhancing Technologies, such as homomorphic encryption, are becoming more popular because of their importance in addressing this often-overlooked security gap. This can be seen through their increased adoption rates. Additionally, governments worldwide are helping organisations consider how PETs could unlock opportunities for data-driven innovation whilst protecting the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data. The British Government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s PET adoption guide is a case in point.

What lies ahead?

While there are several benefits to the adoption of PETs to protect digital rights, its last-mile proliferation at the /user level remains a problem. Users mostly learn about PETs for tracking protection via their research or with the help of family and friends.

Privacy-enhancing tools and methods can go a long way in helping Internet users protect themselves on online platforms. However, the need of the hour is to ensure that the current complexity in regulations, implementation, and enforcement, does not make it difficult for them to adopt such tools effectively.

The author is Astrid Gobardhan, Senior Data Privacy Counsel, VFS Global.