Research and analysis

Privacy Enhancing Technologies: cost-benefit awareness tool

A tool to support organisations to assess costs and benefits of adopting Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs).

Documents

Details

The Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) cost-benefit awareness tool is a resource to support organisations to make good decisions about emerging PETs. The term PETs can cover a broad set of technologies.

The checklist is used alongside the tool and explains what a organisation should consider before deploying PETs.

The PETs cost-benefit awareness tool

This tool focuses on a set of “emerging PETs” that provide solutions to privacy challenges in modern data-driven systems. Examples of PETs include:

  • homomorphic encryption
  • trusted execution environments
  • secure multi-party computation
  • differential privacy
  • systems for federated data processing.

PETs can help organisations to make better use of data in ways that preserve privacy. To illustrate the variety of use cases PETs can enable, see the repository of PETs use cases, which is a collection of real-world use cases that use a range of emerging PETs.

Background

The PETs cost-benefit awareness tool has been designed by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Updates to this page

Published 7 November 2024

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