When Data Can’t Move but Insight Must: What Official Statistics Teach Us About Deploying PETs in the Real World

  • Panel
  • Orangerie
  • Thursday 21.05 — 17:20 - 18:40

Organising Institution

Statistics Netherlands

Netherlands

Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, or CBS) is the official, independent national statistical agency of the Netherlands. CBS’ statutory task is to compile statistics on a wide range of topics that are important to society and to make the outcomes publicly available.
  • Academic 2
  • Business 2
  • Policy 2
National statistical offices have long operated at the sharp edge of privacy, trust, and public-interest data use. As governments demand more timely, granular, and integrated data - often spanning borders - NSOs are turning to privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to reconcile data needs with strict legal and ethical constraints. Drawing on the work of the UN Committee of Experts and real PETs deployments – from international trade reconciliation to privacy-preserving linkage, federated learning, and differential privacy – this panel examines what it takes to use PETs in production. It explores how legal, policy, and technical stakeholders collaborate, and why standard anonymisation and traditional disclosure controls are insufficient for today’s data ecosystems. What emerges are practical lessons for strengthening privacy-by-design, shaping cross-border data frameworks, and building the trusted data infrastructures needed for the next decade..

Questions to be answered

  1. What unique value do PETs offer over traditional anonymisation and data disclosure practices, and how can this facilitate more effective data collaboration?
  2. What practical challenges do organisations face when deploying PETs, and how can these be overcome?
  3. What capabilities – e.g. technical, legal, cultural – do institutions need to successfully operationalise PETs?
  4. What do recent practical deployments, like the UN PET Lab's projects, tell us about where this field is heading?

Moderator

Matjaž Jug

Statistics Netherlands - Netherlands

Matjaž Jug is Strategic Advisor for Data Management at Statistics Netherlands. He holds MSc in Computer Science from the University of Ljubljana. During his career he worked in senior leadership positions in Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia and Statistics New Zealand as well as in consultancy roles for several international organizations. He is an active participant in the international statistical community where he leads the Task Team on Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PETs), part of the UN Committee of Experts in Big data and Data Science.

Speaker

Dave Buckley

OpenMined - International

Dave Buckley is a technology policy consultant specialising in privacy technologies and data governance. He works in policy and partnerships at the OpenMined Foundation, a non-profit building open-source infrastructure for privacy-preserving AI, and co-chairs the UN PET Lab. Previously, he worked as a technology adviser in UK government, and was a software engineer in the private sector.

Speaker

Robert Pisarczyk

Oblivious - Ireland

Robert Pisarczyk is the CEO and Co-Founder of Oblivious, a Dublin-based company pioneering Privacy-Enhancing Technologies. Oblivious empowers financial institutions and tech firms to safely accelerate AI adoption and turn compliance into a competitive advantage. Robert holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford, supervised by quantum cryptography pioneer Prof. Artur Ekert, with research published in top-tier journals. Previously, he was a researcher at the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Robert is a member of the United Nations Task Team on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies and an editor of the UN PET Guide.

Speaker

Rosanne Turner

Statistics Netherlands - Netherlands

Dr. Rosanne Turner works as a methodology researcher at Statistics Netherlands, specifically on privacy preserving technologies, synthetic data and statistical disclosure control. Before coming to Statistics Netherlands she worked as a researcher in academic healthcare and at the National research institute for mathematics and computer science in the Netherlands on topics related to federated learning, privacy preserving technologies and statistics in a distributed setting.

Speaker

Yurii Sushko

Google - International

Yurii Sushko is an engineer leading Google’s Anonymization team in Munich, Germany. Yurii’s team builds anonymization and differential privacy infrastructure and helps Google teams all across the company to correctly anonymize data. In his role, Yurii actively collaborates with Google's research teams to translate cutting-edge privacy research into practical solutions that facilitate safe and compliant data usage. Yurii had a PhD in bioinformatics from Technical University of Munich, where he developed open solutions for AI-assisted drug design.