Privacy-Enhancing Technologies

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.

What are PETs?

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.

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 a secure hashing tool called SILK to convert sensitive information such as Social Security Numbers into securely-hashed values to enable linkages across government agencies and school districts. This open-source approach enables data joins without exposing personal identifiable information.

explore SILK