Privacy Enhancing Technologies Adoption Guide

Welcome to the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation’s (CDEI) Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Adoption Guide!

This is an interactive site we have built in order to help organisations consider how the adoption of PETs could unlock opportunities for data-driven innovation, whilst protecting the privacy and confidentiality of sensitive data. This guide is primarily aimed at technical architects and product owners working on projects that involve the sharing or processing of sensitive information.

This is a BETA version of the Adoption Guide. We will gather feedback over the coming months in order to maximise its relevance and usefulness. A final version of the Guide will be published later in 2021.

Background

We have been researching the role of privacy enhancing technologies in enabling safe, private and trustworthy use of data. These emerging technologies have the potential to be disruptive in enabling valuable data sharing and analysis whilst protecting privacy and confidentiality. For this potential to be fully realised, we need an environment that encourages and facilitates effective adoption of these technologies. To contribute to this, we have been investigating uses of PETs across a range of sectors, which has informed the creation of this Adoption Guide to aid decision-makers in thinking about how PETs might be used in their data projects.

On this site you will find:

• Background on what PETs are, and the opportunities they present
• The core Adoption Guide - a question-based flowchart to aid decision-makers in thinking through which PETs may be useful in their projects
• A repository of real-world use cases collated from our research so far
• A catalogue of additional resources for further reading
• A contact page - we are keen to receive constructive feedback on the site so that future iterations can be as effective as possible

Though PETs can help enable innovation, there are challenges in adopting and implementing them effectively. This Guide aims to help raise awareness and understanding of how PETs can be used in practice, but also highlights some of the key limitations that should be considered when adopting certain PETs. Moreover, PETs should never be treated as a silver bullet solution to privacy concerns, and organisations should apply additional good practices to ensure sensitive data is handled safely and securely.