The UN has announced a new “privacy lab” to unlock the benefits of international data sharing, with the help of Irish tech start-up Oblivious Software.

There is a large economic incentive to improve international data sharing. In 2019, global consulting firm McKinsey estimated that connecting data across institutional and geographic boundaries could create roughly $3trn in annual economic value by 2020.

Experts from national statistics organisations (NSOs), the private sector and academia are working with privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that will allow private data to be analysed and processed without offering direct access to it.

Decisions made by governments on policy issues such as the economy, environment, and healthcare could benefit from data provided by other countries. One example of this would be extracting key insights on the performance of an economy or the behaviours of its citizens from census data.

The UN PET Lab’s goal is to demonstrate that PETs can make fully compliant data sharing and data insights between organisations possible for the first time. Oblivious and privacy-focused community OpenMined have joined to enable safe experimentation with PETs. The Lab expects new users and providers to join in the future.

Head of technology and co-founder of Oblivious, Dr Jack Fitzsimons, told Silicon Republic that the idea of the virtual lab began last Summer.

“In a relatively short timeframe, we already have two techniques demonstrated on a use case relating to international trade data provided by the UN ComTrade.”

The new project was announced at the Dubai Expo 2020 on 26 January this year. Under the UN Committee of Experts on Big Data and Data Science for Official Statistics, the ‘UN PET Lab’ is running a pilot program with four NSOs. These are the US Census Bureau, Statistics Netherlands, the Italian National Institute of Statistics and the UK’s Office for National Statistics.

Fitzsimons added that NSOs are prime candidates to “pioneer new technologies such as these”, as they have stringent responsibilities to protect the data they work with while having a duty to provide data and statistics for policy decisions.

“The work of the lab to date would be nothing without them driving it forward,” Fitzsimons added.

Oblivious involvement

Oblivious is a NovaUCD spin-out founded in 2020 by Fitzsimons and Dr Robert Pisarczyk, that focuses on the transparent processing of confidential data.

Fitzsimons said the company has been working with the UN Committee of Experts for two years, as part of the Privacy-Preserving Technologies Task Team. This was formed in April 2018 to bridge the gap between privacy technology providers and NSOs. He added that the new lab is “really an extension” of Oblivious’ work with this team.

“The UN PET Lab, of course, is not intended to advocate for an individual vendor or specific PET. Rather, it is a highly collaborative environment where we have been fortunate to work with other great tools and organisations.”

Fitzsimons described PETs as a set of techniques that enable the processing and sharing of data without revealing the underlying private or sensitive information. He said Oblivious technology allows multiple parties to run joint computation without revealing their data to each other.

“As a long-term goal, I think privacy enhancing technologies can change how people think and interact with other parties over the internet, from a consumer level right through to a B2B level…. they have the potential to radically change how individuals and corporations interact with each other on a daily basis.”

GDPR and privacy regulations

Fitzsimons said one of the key forces behind the growth of PETs is privacy regulations that are being introduced around the world, such as GDPR. According to the Schrems II ruling in July 2020, transfers of personal data from the EU to the US can only take place if there is a sufficient level of protection.

Concerns over data breaches is limiting the ability of institutions to share data internationally, with the cost of a breach being $4.24m on average according to an IBM 2021 report.

Fitzsimons said regulators have started looking at PETs to help with data sharing and that the EU Commission pointed to a lack of technological solutions to achieve “responsible and privacy-compliant data sharing between organisations”.

“Nevertheless, PETs are not one-size-fits-all solutions and each use-case needs to be considered individually. PETs are a tool that can help to stay compliant but they are not a remedy for all the aspects of privacy compliance.”

Last December, Ireland set up a Data Governance Board to create and implement a framework on the usage and sharing of data across the public service sector. Under the framework, the Government said that data will “only be shared where necessary and only in accordance with the law”.

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