Practical Takeaways from FPF’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop

In April, the Future of Privacy Forum and the Mozilla Foundation hosted an all-day workshop with technology, legal, and policy experts to explore Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). During the workshop, multiple companies presented technologies they developed and implemented to preserve individuals’ privacy. In addition, the participants discussed steps for broadening the adoption of these technologies and their intersection with data protection laws. 

Mastercard’s Chief Privacy Officer, Caroline Louveaux, presented the first PET, a privacy-preserving technology tested in a new cross-border fraud detection system. Louveaux presented how the system employs Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a technique that enables analysis of encrypted data, and the participants discussed the benefits related to privacy and broader compliance requirements this technique captures.  

To learn more about the presentation and discussion, download FPF’s new Issue Brief, PETs Use Case: Preventing Financial Fraud Across Different Jurisdictions with Fully Homomorphic Encryption. 

The second PET presentation by Robert Pisarczyk, CEO and Co-Founder of Oblivious, was an overview of how Oblivious implemented a privacy-perserving technology in partnership with an insurance company to tackle a common tension between data privacy and utility. The companies applied differential privacy techniques to retain information from personal data while complying with legal requirements to delete it. By anonymizing data before deletion, differential privacy allows businesses to generate summaries, trends, and patterns that do not compromise individual privacy. The participants discussed this new technique through the lens of data deletion, and whether differential privacy meets the requirements for it under existing data protection laws like the GDPR. 

To learn more about the presentation and discussion, download FPF’s new Issue Brief, PETs Use Case: Differential Privacy for End-of-Life Data.

Common themes that arose during the workshop included:

• PETs may assist companies with broader financial regulation compliance in addition to data protection regulations; 
• The lack of clear regulatory guidance forces organizations to rely on best practices, trust, and adherence to local laws between/across jurisdictions;
• No single PET or technology can address every risk or threat; in many cases, multiple PETs and privacy protections are beneficial and can help reduce risk; 
• Synthetic data and regulatory sandboxes were essential for PETs’ development and proof of concept; and
• Companies need more incentives to develop and implement PETs, especially given their high cost and regulatory uncertainty. 

Read more details about the workshop in the new FPF publication, PETs Workshop Proceedings. 

The Research Coordination Network (RCN) for Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award #2413978 and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science under Award #DE-SC0024884.