Companies and organizations are collecting more data than ever before, increasing potential security and privacy risks that privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) could help reduce, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
PETs can modify, hide, or process data to make it difficult to access sensitive information, GAO explained in a report published Tuesday. They can also enable companies and organizations to work collaboratively on sensitive data that they otherwise wouldn’t share, such as financial or medical information, GAO added.
The report comes as federal agencies’ use of artificial intelligence (AI) expands and industry integrates more AI services into business operations. GAO suggested that PETs could enable the responsible deployment of AI and other applications that use large volumes of personal information.
“Newer technologies that focus on minimizing shared data and limiting uses are improving the ways data can be used while protecting privacy,” GAO said. “They can facilitate global collaboration on research and fraud detection while also reducing privacy risks associated with using and sharing data.”
According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 5.45 billion people have been impacted by nearly 100,000 data breaches since 2005. And in 2024, Americans lost $1.4 billion due to personal data breaches, the FBI reported.
Experts have warned that cybersecurity is becoming increasingly more important as AI and other emerging technologies help cyber threat actors carry out attacks.
GAO outlined three types of PETs that can address security and privacy risks:
- Data obfuscation, which hides or changes data to make it difficult to accurately identify personal information
- Next-generation encryption processing tools, which keep information encrypted while in use
- Federated analytics and secure multi-party computation, which enable multiple parties to access parts of datasets, so the rest of the dataset remains secure even if one party is compromised
While PETs are mostly mature and are increasingly being used for AI, GAO noted that they still present some challenges. These include demand for computing resources, skill sets, and time, and lack of federal guidance on how or when to them.
Ultimately, GAO said that PETs introduce new policy-related questions, including what additional steps government and companies should take to better protect consumer data, whether Washington should play a larger role in accelerating adoption of PETs, and how institutions can strike a balance between stronger privacy protections and growing demands for data sharing and transparency.