Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET)

We think of the internet as modern technology, but the World Wide Web is about 35 years old now. The underlying “internetworked” system is another decade or two older than that, depending on how you define a network. When this technology was first deployed, they weren’t really worried about security and privacy. We’ve had to bolt it on after the fact, which was not ideal. However, as surveillance capitalism has run amok and warrantless surveillance has become commonplace, computer scientists and human rights organizations have worked to create powerful and promising new tools to protect our personal data from prying eyes. We call them Privacy Enhancing Technologies, or PET.

This is the first in a series of articles. I wanted to take the time to introduce you to some important innovations in the realm of digital privacy – explain how they work and what problems they’re trying to solve. When possible, I’ll tell you how you can use them yourself. Today, though, I’ll start with a little overview of the concept itself and offer a glimpse at some specific topics I’ll cover down the line.

Trust No One

Over the many years that the internet has grown from a private system used by universities and governments to share data to the globe-spanning web of billions of devices used by nearly every human being, our model of trust has had to change drastically. As we share and transfer more and more personal information, we’ve been faced with the harsh reality that our data is both highly coveted and difficult to protect properly.

Over this time, we’ve come to the sad conclusion that we really can’t trust anyone with our data. And it’s not that everyone is out to get you. To borrow from Hanlon’s Razor, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence or laziness. Security is hard and the financial incentives to get it right just aren’t there – at least not yet. Regardless, the upshot is that we’ve had to keep shrinking our ‘circle of trust’ to the point where we really just don’t want to have to trust anyone else, if we can help it – in some cases, not even our own devices.

First we had antivirus software because we were worried we might accidentally install malware. Then we had secure enclaves and trusted platform modules to use as vaults for our passwords and secret keys. We have guest networks for other people’s devices and even for our own IoT devices that we don’t trust. And now we have individual, granular permissions on every app we install (on smartphones and even now on our computers) because we don’t trust the software makers not to abuse our privacy.

And that’s just the ‘client side’ of things. We’re now syncing and storing tons of our data in ‘the cloud’ (which is just another name for someone else’s computer). And with AI functionality being added to everything, we’re sending even more personal data to the cloud for processing, often without proper warning let alone being given the ability to say no.

Upcoming Articles

So I thought it would be good to discuss some promising privacy enhancing technologies we’ve come up with to reduce the amount of data we share and better protect that data when we choose to share it. These techniques and tools show a lot of promise. Some are already here; others are just over the horizon. Here’s a partial list of topics I’m hoping to cover:

• Differential privacy
• Onion routing
• Zero-knowledge proofs
• Synthetic data
• Decentralized ID
• Homomorphic encryption
• Secure multiparty computation

I know those sound pretty esoteric, but they may be key to protecting our privacy. I’ll do my best to explain them in layman’s terms – not just how they work, but how we can use them to make our lives better. (If you’d like to recommend any related topics, feel free to contact me.)

I’ll cover timely topics as usual, with actionable advice, and sprinkle the PET explainers in from time to time when I don’t have a burning issue to address.