The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has released new guidance to organisations looking to adopt Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) to best utilise the technology and understand its costs and benefits.

As part of its guidance, the ICO has released a new tool to assess the cost-benefit awareness of PETs adoption, with a specific focus on emerging PETs.

These emerging PETs include a group of technologies that provide new solutions to privacy challenges in modern, data-driven systems. These include trusted execution environments, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, and multi-party computation.

Uptake of these emerging technologies is currently low as organisations struggle to ascertain the cost and benefit of adopting these technologies that have yet to reach full maturity.

However, PETs can help organisations unlock more value from their data, and protect people’s privacy in new, innovative ways.

The ICO’s tool, which was created in collaboration with the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT), aims to help organisations better understand the potential impact these technologies can have.

The tool, which is informed by interviews with industry and academics, is structured around examples of using different PETs for “privacy-preserving federated learning.” The example revolved around training machine learning models without centralised data collection, whilst protecting the privacy of data in the wider system.

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Through the example, the ICO provides ways in which the tool can be used to access the costs and benefits of using PETs.

Use cases would include making data available to external audiences, carrying out collaborative statistical analysis on data, and securing data processing activities in digital environments with various security measures.

The tool helps organisations balance the benefits of PETs, which include reducing individual risk, as well as how it can actually reduce long-term compliance costs.

The ICO recommends those considering using PETs should explore the guidance and use to tool to see what PETs would be appropriately implemented across their organisation.