McCourt School of Public Policy
Massive Data Institute
Massive Data Institute

Privacy-Enhancing Technologies 

Privacy Enhancing Technologies Logo "Guiding Educators on sharing and protecting Student Data"

Data generated in the education sector—including information about individual learners, schools, and institutions —can provide important insights into how students progress from cradle to career. Through our Privacy-Enhancing Technologies initiative, we’re providing school districts and education agencies guidance on how to securely use student data to improve service delivery and learner outcomes. 

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are a group of cryptographic techniques that increase data protection to allow more secure data analysis and sharing. They work by masking identifiers, automating access rules, and altering outputs to protect individuals and groups from harms. PETs are being used within educational settings (see examples here) to extend safeguards currently in place to protect student data used in compliance reporting, service delivery, and research.  

Learn With Us 

Through a series of trainings, toolkits and templates, we aim to guide education system leaders and data analysts on how to boost data security to make important research possible while protecting students.

Check Out our Recent Report on Implementing Synthetic Data
Trainings

Watch past trainings and access slides. 

Resources

Browse our tools and templates. 

Research

Explore research articles from the field.

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PETs in the World

Georgia Policy Labs

Georgia Policy Labs created an open-source secure hashing tool called SILK to convert sensitive information securely-hashed values, to enable linkages across government agencies without exposing sensitive information.

Explore SILK

Washington’s Education Research & Data Center

Washington state’s Education Research & Data Center developed a virtual secure enclave—the Education Data Enclave (EDE)—to allow authorized researchers to access de-identified student data.

Read about the EDE

The College Scorecard

The College Scorecard is a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Education and the Internal Revenue Service that uses differential privacy to allow for the safe release of aggregate earnings information on U.S. colleges and universities.

Check out the Scorecard