The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) are working on a cost-benefit analysis tool for the use of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs).
CDEI said the project is aimed at helping organisations interested in adopting PETs to better understand the costs and what they could gain, and that it will form part of its updated adoption guide for the technology.
This comes a few days after the ICO published new guidance on PETs and urged organisations to begin using them to share people’s personal information.
CDEI said work on the project has already begun with a research phase involving interviews with stakeholders using different types of PETs, including homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, differential privacy, synthetic data, federated learning and analytics, and trusted execution environments.
Main findings
This has produced two key findings. One is the importance of a problem led approach rather than a focus on a specific technology; the other is the need to combine quantitative and qualitative information around implementing PETs.
“By developing this tool, the CDEI and ICO hope to encourage wider adoption of PETs through understanding and addressing common challenges in implementation and highlighting the opportunities enabled by these technologies,” CDEI said in a blogpost.
It is now looking to engage with public and private sector organisations on the project.
