Privacy and Data Balkanization: Circumventing the Barriers
This work addresses data balkanization issues for organizations seeking to share data for services and research, though it is incremental as it builds on existing cryptographic protocols.
The paper tackles the problem of data sharing being hindered by privacy concerns and laws, proposing techniques using private information transfer to assess benefits and negotiate prices, while also addressing potential quantum vulnerabilities by incorporating quantum technology for improved security.
The rapid growth in digital data forms the basis for a wide range of new services and research, e.g, large-scale medical studies. At the same time, increasingly restrictive privacy concerns and laws are leading to significant overhead in arranging for sharing or combining different data sets to obtain these benefits. For new applications, where the benefit of combined data is not yet clear, this overhead can inhibit organizations from even trying to determine whether they can mutually benefit from sharing their data. In this paper, we discuss techniques to overcome this difficulty by employing private information transfer to determine whether there is a benefit from sharing data, and whether there is room to negotiate acceptable prices. These techniques involve cryptographic protocols. While currently considered secure, these protocols are potentially vulnerable to the development of quantum technology, particularly for ensuring privacy over significant periods of time into the future. To mitigate this concern, we describe how developments in practical quantum technology can improve the security of these protocols.