Public-Purpose Technology Intelligence
Summary
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- Founded in 2014
- Total funding £113 million
- Latest venture round: Series C, £65 million
- Investors include HSBC Venture Capital Coverage Group, Warburg Pincus, Accel, Partech, AstraZeneca
- 200 FTEs
- Key clients/partners includes the NHS, Eastern AHSN
- Key executives: Jason du Preez, Co-Founder and CEO: serial entrepreneur, enterprise software architect; Jason McFall, CTO: physicist (Stanford, Imperial, Oxford), data analytics expert; John Taysom, Co-Founder and Non-executive Director: venture investor, visiting fellow/data privacy researcher at Cambridge, Harvard, and UCL.
Profile
Organisations are collecting and processing an unprecedented amount of data. Where personal data is involved, privacy risks for individuals can emerge. These risks can be particularly acute for public sector organisations, which process highly sensitive personal data, such as health records (for example, the National Health Service) or financial data (for example, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs).
By delivering comprehensive data privacy techniques and streamlining data provisioning via the Privitar Data Privacy Platform™, Privitar ensures that sensitive data is safe and usable. It thus helps organisations to realise the value of data that they collect, manage, and use, including to support decision-making, while minimising risk. Privitar empowers organisations to define, manage, and apply consistent data privacy policies across locations and data environments while optimising data utility and privacy by applying privacy policies to data according to context while controlling data linkability in the dataset provisioned for each request. By integrating with cloud and on-premise data pipeline technologies via APIs, the platform automates data privacy, which helps organisations enforce policies for data distribution, access, and expiration by tagging datasets with immutable metadata. Organisations can thus observe data policies by design.
The platform also facilitates forensic investigations, particularly important in the case of data breaches, through the addition of Watermarks that describe data provenance, making it easy to track down the data’s origin should it be compromised. In addition, the web-based user interface enables non-technical users to manage data privacy without deep knowledge of privacy engineering.
Privitar are experts on the policy and regulatory context in which their clients operate. Deep understanding of privacy developments in law, regulation, and academia inform their product offering.
Plans
- Continue developing Data Privacy Platform.
- Expand capabilities in enhanced privacy risk management, automated privacy protection, regulatory-focused solutions, and enhancements for cloud platforms.
Who Should Speak To This Company
Public sector organisations that collect, use, and manage sensitive data.
Company In Action
The NHS comprises hundreds of independent trusts that cannot easily share data with each other. It also holds a remarkable corpus of data from tens of millions of English citizens. For researchers and medical professionals to make use of their data, it must be accessible in a central location. Because of the sensitive nature of patient data, the highest level of encryption and anonymity is also crucial. Privitar was selected by NHS Digital, which provides information and technology services for the healthcare system in England, to protect the privacy of their patients and citizens, to ensure their trusts maintain control of their data, and to track and trace the de-identified datasets they produce.
Privitar took a three-pronged approach to the task:
- Privitar’s SecureLink enabled NHS trusts to share data anonymously and securely.
- Privitar ensured that analysts only have access to the information the NHS wanted them to see by creating Protected Data Domains, which prevent separate datasets from being linked together to create larger datasets.
- Privitar’s Data Privacy Platform allowed researchers to securely de-identify data points. This software preserves the patterns that make the data useful without revealing patients’ sensitive personal information.
StateUp View
The increased uptake of technologies from cloud computing to artificial intelligence in the public sector is amplifying the need to ensure that aggregated data collected by its organisations are both accessible and secure. In a context where sophisticated cyberattacks are increasingly targeting government organisations, Privitar’s offerings are likely only to grow in popularity.
Privitar is setting the benchmark for good practice in data privacy. We particularly appreciate their use of watermarks to move beyond the ‘security theatre’ of contracts and assurances regarding data use and breaches. When there are many recipients of the same data, each has plausible deniability around a breach because it could have come from any recipient. A watermark removes that deniability because it inextricably links each recipient to their specific copy of the data. From a statistical perspective all of the copies are the same, but from a security perspective they are no longer fungible. It is also good to see Differential Privacy in use because it again offers provable guarantees.
Importantly, it is clear that Privitar understands the policy side of data security equally as well as the technical side. The company is investing in research around how technology can keep citizens’ data private while also allowing it to be used for the public good.
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