Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are crucial for safeguarding individual privacy while enabling socially beneficial research, data sharing, and advancements in sectors that collect or use sensitive data. As AI systems increasingly rely on vast amounts of data, PETs like differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, federated learning, zero-knowledge proofs, and even model contract clauses can help ensure that personal data remains confidential and secure. This is vital not only for protecting individual rights but also for earning and maintaining public trust in technologies that use data about people.
Ethically implementing PETs is also essential. PETs must be designed and deployed to protect marginalized groups and avoid practices that may appear to be privacy-preserving, but actually exploit sensitive data or undermine privacy. In addition, clear policy guidelines on the deployment of PETs are necessary to help make sound business cases for their use in industry. If PETs are ethically integrated into research and business practices, and if global regulators have an opportunity to support their appropriate deployment, there is enormous potential for increasing technological innovation and societal benefits while upholding privacy and public trust.
FPF supports the development of PETs, convenes experts from around the world to deploy best practices, and provides in-depth analysis of emerging technologies and their policy implications. FPF also leads the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy-funded Research Coordination Network for the use of PETs to advance socially beneficial data sharing and protect people’s privacy as data is increasingly used to train AI models. FPF also facilitates a Global PETs Network of regulators who are interested in the lawful and ethical implementation of these tools.
No Silver Bullet, But a Silver Lining? PETs and International Data Transfers
Is there a role for Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to play in the context of international data transfers? The answer to this question could be one of the keys to unlock trusted cross-border data flows at scale in the age of AI. This was the topic explored in a session organized by the Future of […]
FPF Releases Practitioner Guides on Privacy Enhancing Technologies for Education Stakeholders
The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) has released a suite of practitioner resources on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for the education sector. Building on FPF’s 2025 landscape analysis of PETs adoption by State Education Agencies, the new resources move from landscape analysis to implementation considerations — providing audience-specific guidance for the three practitioner communities most […]
Innovation and Data Privacy Are Not Natural Enemies: Insights from Korea’s Experience
The following is a guest post to the FPF blog authored by Dr. Haksoo Ko, Professor at Seoul National University School of Law, FPF Senior Fellow and former Chairperson of South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Commission. The guest post reflects the opinion of the author only and does not necessarily reflect the position or views […]
FPF Year in Review 2025
Co-authored by FPF Communications Intern Celeste Valentino with contributions from FPF Global Communications Manager Joana Bala This year, FPF continued to broaden its footprint across priority areas of data governance, further expanding activities across a range of cross-sector topics, including AI, Youth, Conflict of Laws, AgeTech (seniors), and Cyber-Security. We have engaged extensively at the local […]
Rethinking Personal Data: The CJEU’s Contextual Turn in EDPS vs. SRB
Author: Cédric Burton The following is a guest post to the FPF blog authored by Cédric Burton, Partner and Global Co-Chair Data, Privacy and Cybersecurity, Wilson Sonsini Brussels. The guest post reflects the opinion of the author only and does not necessarily reflect the position or views of FPF and our stakeholder communities. FPF provides […]
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 […]
Nature of Data in Pre-Trained Large Language Models
The following is a guest post to the FPF blog by Yeong Zee Kin, the Chief Executive of the Singapore Academy of Law and FPF Senior Fellow. The guest blog reflects the opinion of the author only. Guest blog posts do not necessarily reflect the views of FPF. The phenomenon of memorisation has fomented significant […]
The Curse of Dimensionality: De-identification Challenges in the Sharing of Highly Dimensional Datasets
The 2006 release by AOL of search queries linked to individual users and the re-identification of some of those users is one of the best known privacy disasters in internet history. Less well known is that AOL had released the data to meet intense demand from academic researchers who saw this valuable data set as essential […]
CPDP LatAm 2024: What is Top of Mind in Latin American Data Protection and Privacy? From data sovereignty, to PETs
On July 17-18, the fourth edition of the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection Conference Latin America (CPDP LatAm) was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This year’s theme was on “Data Governance: From Latin America to the G20,” highlighting Brazil’s current presidency of the international cooperation forum. As in previous years, FPF participated on the […]
Connecting Experts to Make Privacy-Enhancing Tech and AI Work for Everyone
The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) launched its Research Coordination Network (RCN) for Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics on Tuesday, July 9th. Industry experts, policymakers, civil society, and academics met to discuss the possibilities afforded by Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs), the inherent regulatory challenges, and how PETs interact with rapidly developing AI systems. FPF experts […]