DSIT & ICO publish new tool for privacy enhancing technologies

The Department for Science and Technology’s Responsible Technology Adoption Unit and the Information Commissioner’s Office has released a PETs Cost-Benefit Awareness Tool to help organisations understand and assess the costs and benefits associated with adopting a variety of privacy enhancing technologies - you can find it here.

The tool focuses on ‘emerging PETs’, a group of technologies that provide novel solutions to privacy challenges in modern data-driven systems. Examples of emerging PETs include: homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, secure multi-party computation and differential privacy.

As the ICO states: “PETs can help organisations across a range of sectors unlock more value from data and drive innovation in ways that can protect people’s privacy. However, uptake of these technologies is low, in part due to challenges organisations face when assessing the costs and benefits of adopting technologies which are still reaching full maturity. This tool, the result of a collaboration between DSIT and the ICO has been developed to support organisations to overcome this challenge.”

The tool features both hypothetical examples and references to real-world use cases to illustrate the variety of applications for PETs across sectors. A broader collection of real-world use cases is available to read in a Repository of PETs Use Cases.

In addition, a checklist has been published to give an overview of the different areas that should be considered before deploying a PETs-based solution.