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The Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP released a white paper on privacy-enhancing and privacy-preserving technologies. The paper explores how organizations are approaching privacy-enhancing technologies ("PETs") and how PETs can advance data protection principles and provides examples of how specific types of PETs work. It also explores potential challenges to the use of PETs and possible solutions to those challenges.

The Bank of Canada published a paper that explores the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in the design of central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems, potentially paving the way for solutions that better safeguard end-user privacy and meet rigorous data protection standards. PETs can offer robust protection for data throughout their lifecycle, whether stored, in transit or during processing, and ensure privacy is maintained even when data are extensively shared or analyzed. However, they can introduce performance overheads and add complexity to systems, and their effectiveness and applicability are currently limited due to their early stage of development. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how PETs can transform privacy design in financial systems and the implications of their broader adoption.

The Bank of England (BoE) published a joint report with MIT Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) on how privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) could be used to enhance the privacy of a potential digital pound. The paper focused on pseudonymization, zero-knowledge proofs, and secure multiparty computing. It found that these technologies present opportunities for a central bank digital currency (CBDC) to be at least as private as current forms of digital money and potentially even more private as they mature. While PETs, on their own, do not guarantee privacy, the approaches explored in this paper seek to safeguard consumers' private information, enable compliance with existing regulations, and strengthen trust and confidence in a digital pound, should one be launched in the future.

"Phone numbers and email addresses added as profile attributes, those provided for security purposes such as two-factor authentication, those provided to the Facebook Messenger app for the purpose of messaging, and those included in friends' uploaded contact databases are all used by Facebook to allow advertisers to target users."

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a paper on how technology can enhance privacy in digital payment systems. It classifies privacy-enhancing designs along the dimensions of privacy versus auditability, and soft institution- versus hard technology-based solutions. It maps existing technologies into this taxonomy and assesses them. Sophisticated techniques allow having both hard privacy and limited transparency by employing hard-coded rules that dictate which data remains inaccessible. On balance, there is promise in novel concepts like zero-knowledge-proofs, but current technologies suffer from security and computational capacity limitations in.