Less poverty through better data insights

Understanding who needs help

How do you ensure that money that has been made available reaches the right people? To do so, you need more than income data to determine whether someone is eligible for help. Data such as asset data, for example.

Combining and enriching data from different organisations and agencies generates new insights. In this way, you can compare data, gain insights, and demonstrate where help is most needed.

Privacy-friendly with technology

An important question here is how to handle sensitive personal data securely. Privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) make this possible.

Take, for example, the multi-party computation (MPC) technology. MPC homomorphically encrypts citizens’ data. As a result, computation can take place on encrypted data without the need for intermediate decryption.

This allows agencies to exchange data with each other and perform calculations without being able to see each others’ data. Thus, the data are encrypted, and the key is not shared.

Collaboration is essential

In the market, companies like Linksight, Roseman Labs, and Syntho are already working on solutions for the privacy-friendly use of data. But their application often takes some doing.

This is why there is a need to share knowledge and experiences, establish standards, find out the best applications and examples, and much more. That is what TNO is working on.

It is important that the private and public sector speak the same language. We can only do this together. TNO is contributing to this as part of NICPET (the National Innovation Centre for Privacy-Enhancing Technologies), among others, in which we are collaborating with several ministries and implementing organisations.

The next step is to involve providers (from technology providers to legal advisers) and chain partners from outside of the government.