On February 29th, 2024, OpenMined participated in a side event at the 55th session of the United Nations Statistical Commission, held at the UN Headquarters in New York City. The event, entitled “Enabling responsible access to sensitive microdata using privacy enhancing technologies (PETs),” brought together experts from industry, academia, and the public sector to discuss privacy-preserving approaches to data collaboration.
Executive Director Andrew Trask and Head of Policy Lacey Strahm represented OpenMined at this gathering, which was chaired by Ronald Jansen, an Associate Director within the UN Statistics Division. The event featured three presentations highlighting different applications of PETs in healthcare and official statistics.
During his presentation, Andrew outlined how PETs can revolutionize the way national statistical offices (NSOs) share sensitive microdata with researchers. He presented a compelling vision of researchers extracting specific insights from encrypted data across multiple organizations while maintaining the privacy and security of the underlying data. This approach eliminates the need to access raw data directly, thereby protecting sensitive information while enabling valuable research.
To demonstrate the practical implementation of this vision, Andrew highlighted several successful pilot projects that OpenMined has conducted with statistical offices around the world. These collaborations include work with prominent institutions such as the US Census Bureau, Statistics Canada, the Italian National Institute of Statistics Italy (ISTAT), and IBGE Brazil, showcasing the global applicability and scalability of PETs in statistical operations.
The event also featured valuable insights from other industry experts. Soyean Kim, Head of Product at the Centre for Infectious Disease Genomics and One Health (CIDGOH) at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, discussed privacy-preserving sharing of pathogen genomic data for public health research purposes. Additionally, Massimo De Cubellis, a researcher at ISTAT, presented on the private linkage of international trade microdata in a cloud-based secure enclave, demonstrating how multiple data sources can be combined while maintaining mutual secrecy.
This UN Statistical Commission side event highlighted the growing importance of PETs in enabling secure and responsible data access across various sectors. OpenMined’s participation and presentation of real-world implementations underscores our commitment to advancing the practical application of PETs for public good use cases.
For those interested in learning more about the presentations and discussions, a video recording of the event is available on the UN Statistics Division website: https://unstats.un.org/bigdata/events/2024/unsc-pets/
