Excerpt:
"As companies struggle to get the most out of their data while adhering to strict regulations, privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) have started to gain traction. Among the benefits, this set of technologies allows firms to extract data without compromising individuals’ privacy.
PETs are particularly useful for performing analytics on customer data – something that Facebook owner Meta has been doing to boost the success of its digital advertising business in an increasingly privacy-conscious consumer market.
PETs are gaining so much attention that the US and UK governments announced a joint initiative last year to boost adoption. Businesses will now rightfully consider how PETs can be integrated into their core processes. [...]
One of the core pillars of PETs is homomorphic encryption, which allows complex computations to be performed without decrypting the data. Another type of PET is a trusted execution environment, which allows processing by a secure part of the computer isolated from the main operating system.
Secure multiparty computation, meanwhile, allows different parties to jointly process a dataset without sharing information with each other.
The power of PETs lies in their ability to protect data while it’s being used or processed. This allows searches, analytics and machine learning models to extract value securely and privately from multiple data sources, says Dr. Ellison Anne Williams, founder and CEO at Enveil."
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