The PETs landscape continues to expand. I witnessed this in early April at the PETs Summit in Zurich, and I experienced that expansion again in May at their North American event in Boston. The North American PETs (Privacy Enhancing Technologies) Summit presented an opportunity for us to get a glimpse into how the Privacy Enhancing Technology market is evolving. During the event, we spoke with regulators, data and privacy officers, and others in our space who are all aggressively working together to determine how these technologies can help solve real world challenges while remaining within the letter of the law. We received firsthand knowledge on how organizations are incorporating PETs and ancillary solutions to address data sharing challenges where privacy preservation is mandated.
It is clear, now more than ever, that this market is rapidly evolving both in terms of awareness, and adoption. The applicability of privacy-preserving technologies to drive not just market changing, but world changing initiatives, has begun. Organizations are working together to collaborate in ways that are guaranteed to protect the privacy of individuals and intellectual property all while complying with applicable regulations, while realizing more value from the data they hold.
This type of data sharing and combining of data sources are now unlocking previous unobtainable collaborations between companies. For example, organizations that have access to genetic sequencing data are now being combined with clinical data from healthcare systems to create therapies that can ward off diseases for people with certain genetic characteristics. Public sector agencies are collaborating with business to share data that can be used to identify virus outbreaks faster. Advertisers are learning how to wean themselves from dependency on third-party cookies, while continuing to deliver data enriched targeted ads. Banks can reduce the incidence of fraud by collaborating across the financial ecosystem. All of these examples are at the forefront of Duality’s mission, and I am both proud and excited to be a part of this evolution.
Barriers to leveraging these new privacy enhancing technologies are also dissipating. Regulators more thoroughly understand the gaps in current regulations and are better able to communicate with legislators how the impact of changing the laws to close the gaps will result in meaningful benefits. It was also evident that there is an increasing dialog between regulators, legislators, and technology vendors to clarify potential misconceptions about the technologies at their disposal and provide more certainty about applicable use cases. There is no one size fits all approach to any one enterprise, but there are technologies that will provide them a holistic approach that takes their goals and infrastructure into account first and foremost.
In addition, another key insight that struck me was a sense of collegiality amongst the various PET vendors that were in attendance. I think there is a recognition that by unifying to continue to educate and build awareness, the tide will continue to rise to everyone’s benefit. It is an all for one, one for all approach that is truly exciting!
Lastly, the solution vendors that were in attendance had very real use cases – from simple approaches like ensuring that data an organization received from a European partner does not contain PII that puts them at risk of GDPR violations, to more complex ones. For instance, needing to combine sensitive models containing proprietary intellectual property with third party transportation data to determine insurance premiums. The use cases are coming in a variety of flavors, but they are growing swiftly as industry realizes both the practicality and efficiency associated with the use of PETs.
The world of Privacy Enhancing Technology requirements is expanding rapidly – and Duality Technologies is positioned to be at the center of it. What a time to be a part of an evolving market that is going to have profound implications across the technology landscape.
To watch our CEO and Co-founder Dr. Alon Kaufman’s presentation at the summit, “The Data Driven Enterprise, Moving to Privacy Enhanced Data Collaboration,” click below.
