Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs)
(Uruguay)
Overview
Open Loop is launching a new policy prototyping program intended to guide and enable companies in Uruguay to leverage and apply privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to help deidentify data and mitigate privacy-related risks, including in AI systems and in the context of the metaverse.
The program will follow the policy prototyping methodology developed by Open Loop. In particular, the Open Loop consortium will test an operational playbook for providing guidance to companies and policymakers in Uruguay on the potential role of PETs in mitigating privacy risks, including the risk of reidentification, while also incentivizing companies in the region and beyond to develop and adopt PETs. Through this methodological approach we will gather the experience of participants receiving, handling and implementing the policy prototype, while testing its clarity, effectiveness and actionability.
The policy prototyping program consists of three modules:
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Capacity building sessions that will (a) explain how different PETs function and are able to preserve the value of data while mitigating privacy risks; (b) analyze the technical and regulatory challenges in the adoption of PETs; and (c) discuss possible ways to scale up the adoption of PETs by businesses, including the role that regulatory incentives could play.
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The testing of an operational guidance (or playbook) on PETs that guides startups on conducting a risk assessment in which different PETs mitigate different privacy risks, and helps them select and apply a PET or multiple PETs that are appropriate for different use cases. Through prototype tasks that companies will be asked to go through in order to implement PETs according to the technical playbook and its risk assessment procedure. The aim is to provide guidance on the operationalization of privacy by design principles through PETs, incentivizing their adoption by the industry.
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A future scenarios workshop that will focus on the challenges and opportunities of PETs in the context of metaverse, based on the findings of the testing with companies.
The findings of this policy prototyping program will be analyzed and synthesized in one report that will include actionable and evidence-based policy recommendations for policymakers and regulators in Uruguay.
This policy prototyping program will:
- Train companies on the state of the art of PETs techniques, tools, challenges and opportunities.
- Help companies identify privacy-related risks that can be mitigated by appropriate PETs through a specific risk assessment procedure.
- Test new and more nuanced ways to understand and operationalize key data protection and PETs related techniques such as: Differential privacy, Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), Federated Learning and Federating Analytics, Trusted Execution Environments, Anonymization Techniques, Cryptographic Techniques, Homomorphic encryption and Synthetic Data.
- Explore and extrapolate how the policy prototype, namely its guidance regarding risk assessment and application of PETs, would operate and perform in a metaverse context.
About the consortium
The policy prototype program engages startups providing B2C services from the following sectors in Uruguay and LATAM, including: Health, Finance, Social Media, Education and the Public Sector. The inception phase with start-ups will start in November and will run until April 2023.
This program is led by the Meta Open Loop team, the Eon Resilience Lab of C Minds, in collaboration with the Agencia de Gobierno Electrónico y Sociedad de la Información y del Conocimiento (AGESIC) and the Unidad Reguladora y de Control de Datos Personales (URCDP) of Uruguay.
For more information about this program, visit: https://www.cminds.co/open-loop-uruguay (en español).
Partners
Participating companies
