A guide to privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)
A slew of data privacy laws have come into effect over the past few years. With these regulations driving increased public awareness around the risks of sharing data with businesses, organizations that fail to protect data privacy are equally at risk of losing customer trust, and therefore long-term revenue, as they are of fines and penalties.
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are a useful set of tools that enable businesses to meet customer expectations and fulfill regulatory requirements.
We’ll take a look at what privacy technologies do, the different types of tools available to businesses, and their role in compliance and data security.
What are privacy-enhancing technologies?
Privacy-enhancing technologies are tools that are designed to protect data and ensure user privacy is maintained during data handling processes.
These tools are essential for helping businesses achieve and maintain compliance with data privacy laws, reducing the risk of data breaches, building trust with customers, and therefore minimizing expenses and increasing business sustainability.
These technologies have a range of applications, but they’re all aimed at minimizing risk and ensuring a secure and well-functioning system. Here are a few PET functions:
- Anonymous credential collection: Enabling users to authenticate themselves without disclosing their identity.
- Consent management: Giving users control over how much of their data is collected and shared when interacting online.
- Data anonymization: Privacy management tools modify personal data to prevent it from being associated with users’ real identities.
- Differential privacy: Using algorithms to add random ‘noise’ to datasets to ensure individual privacy in aggregated data.
- Encryption: Scrambling data during transfer to ensure that its confidentiality is maintained.
PET use cases
Every industry has unique data protection needs that PETs can help to fulfill. The table below outlines some sectors where these technologies can be particularly useful, along with their potential use cases.
| Industry | Uses |
| Healthcare | Securing patient records and research dataEnsuring patient confidentialityEnabling secure data sharing to improve care |
| Finance | Protecting consumers’ financial informationCombating fraudComplying with stringent regulatory requirements |
| Education | Safeguarding student dataManaging access to educational recordsEnsuring compliance with specific regulations around handling children’s data |
| Cybersecurity | Developing robust security frameworksProtecting against data breachesShielding against identity theftMaintaining user anonymity |
| Marketing | Ensuring data minimizationHandling user data in line with major data privacy lawsProducing and proliferating compliant targeted adverts |
The different types of PETs
Data privacy by design and default is a core principle of most major data privacy regulations. Privacy-enhancing technologies are essential for helping businesses to meet this standard.
The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office has outlined a few different types of PETs that enable businesses to obtain the data they need while prioritizing data privacy.
Data minimization and security PETs
These technologies focus on hiding and shielding data subjects’ information, so they are less identifiable. They include mechanisms to increase security by obscuring data, minimizing data collection, or controlling access to data. This helps to limit the potential for unauthorized access to this information.
Data derivation PETs
These PETs weaken the link between individuals’ identities and the data that comes from their information.
Although they effectively reduce the risks associated with data exposure for individuals, the altered data may not be as useful for those handling it. The added noise can impact the data’s utility for certain analyses.
Data hiding and shielding PETs
Techniques like homomorphic encryption and zero-knowledge proofs fall into this category of PETs.
Homomorphic encryption enables encrypted data to be analyzed without revealing the underlying plaintext. This preserves the data’s utility and accuracy while ensuring privacy.
Zero-knowledge proofs enable the verification of truths without the need to disclose underlying data or additional information.
Data splitting and access control PETs
These PETs manage how personal data is structured within systems to ensure that access to that information is well controlled, while maintaining data integrity and confidentiality.
These PETs split datasets for storage or analysis and use dedicated hardware to limit access to data. They also use secure, multi-party computation techniques to reduce the liability between portions of split data.
The benefits of privacy-enhancing technologies
Privacy-enhancing technologies are indispensable tools for navigating the complex world of data security.
By integrating PETs into your tech stack, you can unlock the full potential of your data assets while maintaining data privacy, moving towards regulatory compliance, and building trust with your customers.
Protect user data
Privacy-enhancing technologies use data minimization principles. In other words, they use the least amount of data possible for a specific purpose to reduce the risks associated with handling personal data.
By helping you to limit the amount of information you collect and process, PETs help you to comply with data protection regulations and reduce the potential harm to individuals in the event of a data breach.
Share information more securely and at a granular level
Data sharing can help you to make more informed decisions and create a seamless customer experience. However, it creates a variety of risks, such as regulatory noncompliance.
With PETs, you can implement granular access controls to ensure that only authorized parties are able to view sensitive information. This empowers you to share information across different business units, as well as with third parties, while maintaining a high level of data security.
Adhere to data protection laws
Privacy-enhancing technologies are essential for achieving compliance with major data privacy regulations, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US.
Integrating PETs into your organization’s tech stack can help you to ensure that your data handling practices meet the stringent requirements set by these privacy laws, including data minimization, security, and explicit user consent to data collection.
Improve consumer trust
Public awareness around data privacy risks is at an all-time high and users have begun to expect businesses to build a certain level of security into their data handling processes. PETs play a critical role in demonstrating an organization’s commitment to protecting user privacy.
Customers are more likely to engage with and remain loyal to brands that they perceive to be safeguarding their personal information. Using PETs can help you to show your customers that you prioritize data security and confidentiality, which can lead to increased trust and loyalty.
Examples of privacy-enhancing technologies
There are a variety of PETs that businesses can use to keep data safe and secure. Each is designed to meet specific privacy and security needs, from anonymizing and encrypting information to managing user consents.
Usercentrics
The Usercentrics CMP helps businesses collect, store and manage user consent data to comply with privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA. It equips businesses to streamline compliance and to set granular consent options for data subjects, to meet the rigorous standards set by privacy regulations, and to build trust with their customers.
This PET enhances trust by increasing transparency around organizational data management practices. Plus, it helps businesses to prioritize user privacy while still ensuring that they’re able to access the consented data they need to draw valuable insights.
Amnesia
The Amnesia Anonymization Tool is a data anonymization PET designed to protect users’ data by transforming it into a format where the identity of data subjects can’t be traced. It uses methods like k-anonymity and differential privacy to ensure that datasets are sufficiently anonymized before they’re analyzed.
Amnesia is a crucial tool for businesses that handle sensitive data but still need to derive meaningful insights from that information. It helps organizations meet stringent data protection standards, reduce the risk of breaches, and maintain customer trust while still accessing data insights.
RAPPOR
Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response (RAPPOR) is a sophisticated PET developed by Google. It uses differential privacy techniques to collect and analyze user data in a way that prevents individual data subjects from being identified while providing high-quality aggregate information.
RAPPOR enables businesses to gather data about population preferences and behaviors without compromising individual privacy. It’s especially useful for businesses that need to understand broad user trends without exposing specific user details.
What to keep in mind when employing PETs
It’s crucial to take a holistic view of data privacy and security practices when incorporating PETs into your business’s tech stack. In the words of Usercentrics CMO Adelina Peltea:
“When leveraging PETs, businesses should keep regulatory compliance and business requirements in mind, as well as internal data strategies and security policies. They should consider the future, short and long-term, and what flexibility and scalability needs the company will have, including costs and integrations with existing systems.”
Peltea continues: “They need to keep user experience in mind, which includes everything from UIs to communications, as well as privacy rights and expectations. Businesses also need to figure in upskilling their teams on a regular basis over time.”
Here are a few things to keep in mind when employing these tools:
- They aren’t foolproof: Although they enhance data security, PETs aren’t infallible. They should complement, not replace, other privacy and security messages. Incorporating multiple layers of security into your processes will help to ensure that you’re protected against data breaches and leaks.
- They should be part of a broader security strategy: Privacy-enhancing technologies are most effective when used in conjunction with other security practices and policies. By making PETs part of your broader security strategy, you can ensure comprehensive protection of the data you collect and handle.
- They can impact your data utility: While PETs protect user privacy, they can reduce the utility of the data you collect. It’s important to balance the need to secure data with the need to gather usable data that can be analyzed in a way that supports your business objectives.
- They shouldn’t compromise user privacy rights: These tools can challenge the implementation of certain basic privacy principles. You need to maintain transparency and ensure users can exercise their privacy rights, so the PETs you choose don’t restrict those rights.
Protect user data and stay compliant
Privacy-enhancing technologies have a wide range of applications and benefits. They can help you to protect user data, minimize the potential of that data being exposed as a result of a data breach, and ensure compliance with data privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA.
A consent management platform (CMP) is an essential PET that can enhance your data protection efforts. These tools create transparency around the data that you collect, facilitate granular consent control for users, and make sure that you have the consented information you need to draw valuable insights.
Usercentrics is a robust CMP that enables organizations to protect user data and achieve compliance with all of the major data privacy regulations, ensuring you can collect and handle information while maintaining user privacy.