Excerpt:
The Royal Society's Privacy to Partnership report, published in January, analyses the promise of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), the current state of the market and barriers to adoption. It also provides several recommendations for legislators to help them deliver on their potential value. One of its authors, Jon Crowcroft, professor of communications systems at Cambridge University, says that potential value is huge, and use cases go far beyond the targeted advertising which has so far been the main beneficiary of the big data revolution.
"Adverts associated with search and social media are as nothing compared with what one might do with healthcare data, optimizing energy use across a country, food supply chains, but then suddenly you're in the realm of the personal," he said, during a webinar organized by PET vendor Enveil.
In the realm of personal data, of course, countless regulations and barriers concerning security and commercial confidentiality come into play.
Ellison Anne Williams, CEO of Enveil, spoke of uses in financial service and other highly regulated industries, where privacy and data security are paramount.
"Silos around data are increasing to grow, sometimes for good reasons. So how do you leverage data globally as an asset in a way that accepts those silos and boundaries and the reasons they exist?" she asked.
A global bank onboarding a new customer needs to know "in a business-relevant time frame" whether this customer is being banked anywhere else across other jurisdictions. Currently, that can take "weeks or months", as centralized searching is not legally possible. PETs could remove that restriction. They are currently being assessed by regulators including as the FCA and the ICO, as well as by some financial institutions themselves.
Read the full Computing article here.
