What’s happening around the world
The U.S. government is promoting the use of PETs inside federal agencies and the development of guidelines to evaluate the effectiveness of these privacy controls.
At a global level, the G7 digital ministers in their 2022 Ministerial Declaration1 encouraged more regulatory cooperation on PETs, which may help to support cross-border data flows.
We developed a proof of concept and successfully showed how fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) can facilitate the sharing of financial-crime intelligence across borders. FHE is an exciting development. Analysts can extract insights from encrypted data without having to decrypt it.
This could prove particularly useful in deterring financial crime, which is a huge threat to economies and reputations.
Today, the sharing of financial intelligence — particularly across borders — could be hindered by various regulatory restrictions relating to privacy, cross-border data transfers, banking secrecy and prohibitions against tipping-off within anti-money-laundering laws, the unintended consequence of this being that criminals can hide in the shadows.
$800B to $2T
is laundered every year as estimated by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime2
Exciting times ahead
It's certainly possible that privacy and innovative data use can go hand in hand, but this can happen only with open collaboration between regulators and industry leaders.
We live in an age of increasing distrust around the use and sharing of data, but it is in our collective interest to encourage the use of PETs. The tools exist, and Mastercard is innovating in this space as a thought leader.
We just need to step forward together to make it a wider reality.
At Mastercard, we recently participated in the Singapore government's PETs “sandbox,” a testing ground for PET use cases
The time is now:
The need for privacy-enhancing technologies
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
PETs, the acronym for “privacy-enhancing technologies” that protect information in data, aren’t quite a topic of mainstream discussion. But lately, that’s changing — for good reason.
People are becoming increasingly conscious of
the need for greater protection of their personal data. Inside governments and corporations, leaders are also pressing for adoption of these technologies to keep their information secure.
PETs allow organizations to generate insights and train AI models from data without the need to access the raw data itself. This preserves confidentiality and individual privacy by limiting not just who can access the data but also how it can be used.
1.https://www.bundesregierung.de/resource/blob/998440/2038510/
e8ce1d2f3b08477eeb2933bf2f14424a/2022-05-11-g7-%20ministerial-declaration-digital-ministers-meeting-en-data.pdf?download=1
2. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/overview.html
The time is now: The need for privacy-enhancing technologies
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES