The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) have published a cost-benefit awareness tool for the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs).
They have also produced a checklist on what an organisation should consider before deploying relevant technologies.
The move reflects the increasing interest in PETs in recent years, with the ICO having recommended their use in sharing personal information and published draft guidance, and indications from NHS England that it aims to set up a service to promote their use in healthcare.
The ICO and the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (now absorbed into DSIT) revealed they were working on the tool in June of last year.
The cost-benefit awareness tool provides relevant information and is designed for use by data officers, data architects and data scientists in organisations. It is focused on emerging PETs such as homomorphic encryption, trusted execution environments, synthetic data and federated analytics.
It includes an introduction and three sections on the costs and benefits of federated learning, input privacy considerations and output privacy considerations.
Potential to be realised
“PETs can be adopted across different sectors and by organisations of different sizes,” its introduction says. “However, the potential of these technologies has not yet been fully realised, with adoption currently limited to a relatively small number of use cases.”
Features of the checklist include: looking at the cost and benefits of data storage needed to facilitate a solution; the impact on compute requirements; trade-offs between privacy preserving infrastructures and data utility; the need for any new testing and troubleshooting pathways; technical skills and resources needed; the impacts on compliance with relevant regulations; long term costs and benefits of PETs ecosystem; and barriers and risks in developing a solution.
