Balancing Privacy: Leveraging Privacy Budgets for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

In the past few years, the support for emerging privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that allow for data sharing and analytics while preserving privacy, has grown considerably.

A critical (and sometimes overlooked) aspect in ensuring robust privacy preservation is to account for the privacy budget allocated in any given PETs project. The privacy budget refers to the finite amount of privacy protection that can be allocated when performing various computations or data analyses using PETs.

In this white paper we:

• Give a comprehensive overview of privacy budget allocation for PETs by reviewing different privacy metrics and a number of relevant policy and governance guidelines.
• Show how the concept of a privacy budget can help to demonstrate compliance with the requirements of privacy by design.
• Show how organizations can strike a balance between preserving the privacy of sensitive input data and deriving valuable insights from data analysis.