Report: Privacy-enhancing tech crucial in government data security

State and local governments have been urged by the New America's Open Technology Institute to implement data encryption, hashing, de-identification, and other privacy enhancing technologies to avert potential breaches amid growing concerns regarding the Department of Government Efficiency's increasingly pervasive access to federal agencies' sensitive information, reports CyberScoop.

Aside from creating procurement policies with long-term contracts guaranteeing continuous investment, governments should also establish grant programs and other guidelines to ensure advancements in various PETs, including synthetic data, according to the OTI study. Adopting PETs would be beneficial in combating DOGE's efforts to obtain unauthorized data access, said report author Sydney Saubestre. "Data sharing is really important, but obviously so is privacy... One of the ways that you can remove some of the risk around data sharing is to make sure that you have a privacy-first approach to data sharing, and PETs are a really great way to accomplish that," Saubestre added.