privacy-enhancing technology
What It Means
Privacy-enhancing technology (PET) refers to software tools and techniques that allow organizations to use and analyze data while protecting individual privacy. These technologies enable companies to get business insights from data without exposing personal information or compromising user anonymity. Think of it as a way to have your cake and eat it too - you can still do data analysis and AI training while keeping people's private information protected.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
CAIOs need PETs to comply with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA while still being able to train AI models and extract business value from data. Without these technologies, companies often face a binary choice between using data for AI (risking privacy violations) or protecting privacy (losing competitive advantages). PETs eliminate this trade-off by enabling privacy-compliant AI development and deployment.
Real-World Example
A healthcare AI company wants to train a diagnostic model using patient data from multiple hospitals, but cannot share raw medical records due to HIPAA compliance. They use federated learning (a PET) where the AI model travels to each hospital and learns from local data without the raw patient information ever leaving each facility, creating a powerful diagnostic tool while maintaining strict patient privacy.
Common Confusion
People often think PETs are just basic security measures like encryption or access controls. While those protect data storage and transmission, PETs specifically enable data analysis and computation while the data remains private - they're about using data safely, not just storing it safely.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, privacy-enhancing technologies enable medical organizations to conduct research, train AI models, and sha...
Finance: In finance, privacy-enhancing technologies like differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party com...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"A coherent system of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) measures that protects privacy by eliminating or reducing personal data or by preventing unnecessary and/or undesired processing of personal data, all without losing the functionality of the information system."Source: PET_Handbook
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