APEC: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for Secure Data Governance and Growth
SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure | SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions | SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals
Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) | Data Protection Board of India (DPBI) | AI Safety Institute
The APEC workshop report Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs): Opportunities and Challenges notes that these tools are critical for balancing data utility with individual privacy to drive economic development. Organized by the APEC Digital Economy Steering Group in February 2026, the workshop provided a platform for 99 participants from 11 economies to share experiences in implementing PETs as the technical embodiment of accountability. PETs support privacy compliance, secure data processing, and cross-border data flows, although their adoption is currently hampered by high costs, a lack of standards, and knowledge gaps. The report advocates for a “whole-of-government” shift where policymakers incentivize PET adoption through regulatory sandboxes and legislative clarity, ensuring that security and privacy coexist within digital infrastructure.
Key Pillars of the APEC PETs Framework
Strategic Categories of PETs: Organizing tools into Cryptographic (e.g., Homomorphic Encryption), Distributed Analytics (e.g., Federated Learning), and Obfuscation (e.g., Differential Privacy, Synthetic Data).
Policy & Institutional Design: Incentivizing adoption through liability reduction and integrating privacy into product development early in the lifecycle.
Technological Innovation & Configuration: Carefully selecting PETs to balance privacy and utility, while bridging gaps between legal and technical domains using tools like LINDDUN (a privacy threat analysis method).
Practical Global Application: Leveraging real-world use cases, such as LinkedIn’s Labor Market Insights and Google Maps, to demonstrate how PETs enable secure, large-scale data analysis.
Governance and Standards: Translating legal requirements into engineering-ready specifications and aligning terminology across cross-disciplinary teams.
What is “Differential Privacy (DP)”? Differential Privacy is a mathematically rigorous technique used for secure data release and collection. It works by injecting a calculated amount of “statistical noise” into a dataset so that individual records cannot be reverse-engineered, while the overall patterns and insights remain accurate for researchers. This allows institutions—such as Israel’s National Registry of Live Births—to share sensitive health data for public benefit without compromising the identity of any single individual.
Policy Relevance
While the report does not explicitly mention India, its findings provide a strategic “techno-legal” roadmap for operationalizing the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP Act), 2023, transitioning the nation from simple compliance to “Privacy-First Innovation”.
Strategic Impact:
Securing Digital Transformation: As India expands e-governance through Digital India, PETs provide the necessary safeguards to enable innovation in sensitive sectors like healthcare and finance without compromising citizen data.
Protecting Biometric Sovereignty: Given that the Aadhaar system is one of the world’s largest biometric databases, adopting PETs can enhance the security of these records, ensuring responsible data use in line with global standards.
Empowering the “SaaS Capital” (AI Development): Leveraging India’s 2.5x global AI skill penetration, tools like Federated Learning can enable secure AI model training, positioning India as a global hub for privacy-preserving digital services.
Facilitating Cross-Border Trust: Adopting APEC-aligned PET standards ensures that India’s $300 billion e-commerce export goal is not hindered by data-flow restrictions from partners like the EU or the US.
Formalizing the Informal via DPI: Integrating PETs into existing Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) allows for the secure formalization of the 85% informal workforce, providing them access to credit while protecting their financial privacy.
Follow the full report here: APEC Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies