What is Privacy Enhancing Technologies or PETs ? In actual fact, PETs had been around for years now. However, it is not until recently, PETs shoved its way into the spotlight due to the increase in the level of awareness on the importance of security and privacy. Moreover, with data protection laws (i.e GDPR and CCPA), enterprises should understand the need of PETs as an essential part of their business operation.
Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) comes with various definition. Nonetheless, we believed that these two useful definitions could enlighten us with the definition of PETs.
First, the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) claims that PETs can be defined as ‘software and hardware solutions, such as systems which include technical processes, methods or knowledge to achieve specific privacy or data protection functionality or to protect against risks of privacy of an individual or a group of natural persons.’
Second, according to a report entitled Protecting Privacy in Practice: The Current Use, Development and Limits of Privacy Enhancing Technologies in Data Analysis, PETs refers to an umbrella term that covers a broad range of technologies and methods that can help mitigate security and privacy risks.
At a glance, PETs may resemble cybersecurity, however, in reality PETs and cybersecurity are two different things. While cybersecurity centered around protecting the data from being accessed by unauthorised individuals, PETs, in data analysis, focuses on safeguarding the privacy of the data. In other words, PETs gives access to certain data (not all) to be analysed for derivation of useful information whilst cybersecurity does not. Nevertheless, both are important in ensuring that data is well protected and complied with the data protection law.
Being online may means enjoyment and getting the job done for customers or users but for enterprises, the data being gathered from Internet of Things (IoT) through those online activities equals business opportunities. Today, enterprises relies on the Internet of behaviour (IoB), a term that refers to the process of collecting data that gives valuable information regarding customer habits and behaviour which include interests, preference and purchasing activities. While it is beneficial to enterprises, it may bring violation of privacy issue to the customers. Therefore, PETs is a way to protect the customers data as well as benefit both enterprises and IoT users.
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