2024: A Year in PETs

2024 proved to be a big year for PETs, including more widespread adoption and increased conversation about the importance of privacy when it comes to securing big data. We’ve gathered up the biggest news of the past twelve months, including a mention of a little conference we put together (that was big news to us). Let us know if we missed anything and we’re looking forward to sharing even more news in the new year!

Confidential Computing

We’ve been working on confidential computing since 2021 and couldn’t be more excited to see the increased conversation around it. This year, there has been a huge influx in the adoption and availability of confidential computing, both from major players in the space and cloud providers who are making the same tooling available to a wider industry.

OpenAI put out a call for an adoption of confidential computing to AI accelerators to protect model weights and inference data, while NVIDIA announced a general access to their confidential computing solution on H100 GPUs.

Apple announced a private cloud compute (PCC) which moves its AI workloads into confidential computing environments. You can read more in this blog post or check out this good YouTube interview on PCC. Apple has also announced the integration of other PETs such Homomorphic Encryption together for its Private Information Retrieval and Private Nearest Neighbor Search (PNNS) protocols into its newest mobile operating system iOS.

Microsoft Azure announced general availability of confidential VMs leveraging Nvidia H100 together with significant development on their confidential AI and other offering based on confidential computing like clean rooms. Similarly, AWS announced their partnership with Nvidia and the oncoming availability of GPU instances and in particular GB200 on AWS Nito Enclaves.

Regulators

Arguably the biggest event in the regulatory domain has been the EU AI Act that came into force on 1 August 2024. It of course goes beyond PETs but impacts the development and the use of AI in general. To help organisations understand and assess the costs and benefits associated with adopting a variety of PETs, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and DSIT’s Responsible Technology Adoption Unit (RTA) have published a PETs Cost Benefit Awareness Tool. The tool focuses on a set of emerging technologies including differential privacy and trusted execution environments.

In mid-December, EDPB issued an important opinion on anonymity of AI models in its “Opinion 28/2024 on certain data protection aspects related to the processing of personal data in the context of AI models” also pointing to the implementation of privacy preserving techniques such as differential privacy in evaluating claims data controllers. 

Market News

The biggest news from the market was the adoption of PETs by larger tech companies, which was apparent in the acquisitions that took place this year. Following acquisition of Leapyear and then recently Sambooha (Dec 2023), Snowflake has pushed into the space and also announced their differential privacy capability. Additionally, Liveramp has acquired a clean room company Habu, while SAS acquired Hazy, a leading synthetic data company.

Events

OECD, together with its partners, hosted expert workshops on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. The first workshop took place in London and was co-hosted with the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, as well as the Estonian Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications. The second one was in Singapore in collaboration with Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). The workshops brought experts from the industry, academia, regulators and policymakers to discuss challenges and opportunities in PETs.  

The Eyes-Off Data Summit last September brought over 500 people including the regulators and standards bodies (ICO, FCA, NIST), financial institutions (Citi, Mastercard, Capital One LSEG, Bank of America, Fidelity, Citi, Mastercard, LSEG), tech providers (AWS, OpenAI, Microsoft, IBM, Snowflake), UN, OECD and many others to discuss privacy-enhancing technologies. It proved to be an amazing opportunity to connect with others in the space and we thank everyone who was able to attend. Be sure to get on the waiting list for the 2025 EODS by signing up here.

Thanks

Finally, we wanted to give a special shout out to all those that have supported and collaborated with us over the last twelve months. We’re grateful for our clients and partners who have joined us on the PET journey. Whether virtually or in person, we appreciate the encouragement and wish you all a prosperous New Year!