Despite the big push for stronger privacy regulations and an increased awareness amongst customers for their privacy, many businesses are slower to adopt privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) than one would expect.

In some cases, organisations fear the consequences of violating privacy regulations but lack guidance on which PETs are fit to their data use case, which prohibits them from using the data they hold. In others, organisations struggle to implement privacy technologies properly and share data that hasn’t been sufficiently protected which leads to a breach of privacy.

In this talk, we explore some of the technical challenges organisations are facing when trying to adopt PETs.

We use differential privacy as an example for an emerging privacy technology that could answer many organisations’ need to safely share aggregate statistics, but nonetheless is used by only a few. We look at some of the reasons for its slow adoption and touch on questions such as: Where are the gaps between the applications described in the academic literature and the requirements coming from industry? What are the concepts that are hardest to understand for a non-expert audience?

Below you can find the full video recording of the talk by Theresa Stadler, Data Scientist at Privitar, given at EPFL summer school in Lausanne

Data Privacy