UN PET Lab: bringing together NSOs, academic researchers and PET providers to facilitate the use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Conference
64th ISI World Statistics Congress
Format: IPS Abstract
Keywords: community-based, data-science, data-sharing, privacy, public_good
Session: IPS 351 - New technologies for privacy and transparency in production of official statistics
Wednesday 19 July 2 p.m. - 3:40 p.m. (Canada/Eastern)
Abstract
In recent years, almost every government has been faced with serious challenges, such as the global health pandemic, supply chain disruption and rising energy and food prices. To handle these crises, our leaders need the right data at the right time. National statistical offices are tasked to provide trusted, relevant, timely and high-quality data. Some of the required data are collected by NSOs themselves. However, to act swiftly on emerging issues, additional secondary data sources are needed such as administrative data or private sector data.
At the same time, there has been a rise in sustained cyber threats and advances in methods to re-identify and link data to individuals and across multiple data sources. Data breaches erode public trust and can have serious negative consequences for individuals, groups, and communities. For NSOs it is a paramount to continue applying data protection practices and state-of-the-art technologies to retain very high level of trust of societies.
Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) help data providers and data users to safely share information by using encryption and protocols that allow someone to produce useful output data without “seeing” the input data. They also typically ensure that data will be protected throughout its lifecycle, and that outputs cannot be used to ‘reverse engineer’ the original data.
In 2019 the UN PET Task Team published the first UN Handbook on Privacy-Preserving Computation Techniques which gave insights on the concepts of privacy technology and its potential for Official Statistics. In 2023 the team published the UN Guide on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for Official Statistics with even more extensive review of current state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies; 18 detailed case studies; an overview of new relevant standards; and finally, an introduction to some of the key issues from legal and regulatory perspective.
In addition to describing use cases, the members of the task team started to collaborate in the UN PET Lab with the objective of the experimentation on pilot projects, learning by doing, and offering support services to those who want to be early adopters of PETs.
The UN PET Lab is now focusing its efforts across three core pillars. First, experimentation is advanced through active proofs-of-concept and pilot projects, focused on the evaluation of PETs for real-world use cases in the official statistics community. Outreach and training are promoted by spreading shared learnings and insights from the use of PETs to the wider statistical community through training, public talks, and educational collateral. Finally, support services are offered to enable those using or intending to use PETs to engage with the UN PET Lab and its partners for support and advice.
The ultimate goal of these endeavors is to work toward the creation of a community of practitioners, in which members of the community who are actively using PETs can support one another and share knowledge and support at an international level. This model has been successful in the domain of data science, and it is believed that as the usage of PETs continues to increase, a self-supporting community becomes viable.