Privacy enhancing technologies. Concept and roadmap for an e-government based on the Estonian example.
Would it not be amazing if a country could build data-driven services based on the data of its population or organisations while preserving the privacy of the individuals and providing transparency on the processing? In this talk we will take a look at the possibilities that different privacy enhancing technologies offer by enabling different stakeholders to process data without seeing individual values. We look at issues that public sector organisations have with using PETs and issues that could be solved by PETs.
In the beginning of 2023, Estonia conducted a research project on privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) to work out a concept and roadmap for deploying these technologies in e-government. The project delivered two reports: the PET concept for Estonia, which describes the technologies and provides a concept of generalised usage archetypes for the e-government, and the PET roadmap for Estonia, which describes the experiences of Estonian public sector organisations (e.g., different ministries, healthcare institutions, the Statistics Board, the Data Protection Inspectorate) of using PETs in their work, their needs and requirements for data processing, and provides a roadmap for development and deployment of PETs in the public sector.
The concept report offers an overview of different PETs (for data protection during analysis, identity protection, anonymous communication, and transparency and intervenability). It brings examples of real-life use of the technologies in different countries, and deployment suggestions of how an organisation can integrate privacy engineering into their system lifecycle.
While the concept is universal and can be used by any country, the roadmap report is more focussed on the organisations and needs of Estonia. Even so, the requirements of different types of organisations overlap to some extent with those of other countries. The report gives an overview of the PETs already in use in the public sector in Estonia, and what the requirements and needs are.
Liina Kamm
Liina Kamm received her PhD in computer science from the University of Tartu in 2015. She is a senior researcher and principal investigator at Cybernetica (a deep-tech SME in Estonia). She started her professional career designing software for the Estonian Genome Foundation and for cross-border clinical trials. She then focused her research on enabling privacy-preserving statistical analysis for social sciences and genomics. She is Cybernetica’s PI for the Horizon Europe project CHESS (Cyber-security Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) project PAI-MACHINE on machine-optimising machine learning algorithms for secure multi-party computation.