The Royal Society – the world’s oldest continuously existing scientific academy – has released a landmark report From Privacy to Partnership, marking a significant step forward in understanding how privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could reshape society. This comprehensive study explores how PETs can revolutionize data collaboration while protecting privacy, advancing our understanding of PETs beyond purely privacy-enhancing technologies to instead considering them as partnership-enhancing technologies. This perspective acknowledges PETs transformative potential in enabling new forms of cooperation across organizational and national boundaries.
The report highlights several key findings, including the need for coordinated international action to develop PETs responsibly, the importance of standards and assurance mechanisms, and the critical role of public sector leadership in PET adoption. Through detailed use cases spanning healthcare, energy, humanitarian aid, and social media, the report demonstrates how PETs can enable new forms of data collaboration while preserving privacy.
We’re particularly excited to see our partnership with Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team featured in the report as a pioneering example of using PETs to enhance algorithmic accountability. Our collaboration with Twitter aims to enable external researchers to investigate Twitter’s internal algorithms and datasets while protecting user privacy and Twitter’s intellectual property – a crucial step toward greater platform transparency.
The report also recognizes OpenMined’s educational initiatives, specifically mentioning the courses from our Private AI series – “Our Privacy Opportunity,” “Foundations of Private Computation,” and “Introduction to Remote Data Science” – as important resources for raising awareness and building expertise in PETs. As the report emphasizes the need for better education and training in PETs, these courses help address the critical knowledge gap identified as a barrier to PET adoption.
We welcome the report’s recommendations for developing standards, incentivising PET adoption, and investing in education – such activities support OpenMined’s vision for a world where everyone can use privacy-enhanced, open-source tools to get the answers needed to improve their societies.