Linksight: insights without sharing sensitive data

For this purpose, Linksight uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) for computing encrypted data and blockchain technology for decentralised governance. Linksight is building on TNO encryption technology, which has been developed in collaboration with market players and is now mature enough to be deployed in practice.

This way of working can solve various data-sharing problems, such as:

• Medical research without sharing patient data
• Fraud investigations where nothing more is learned than is necessary
• Benchmarking between companies without revealing competition-sensitive data.

From a legal point of view, use of the Linksight platform represents a very strong implementation of the GDPR.

Data-driven working requires new way of sharing data

Many companies and government bodies want to be ‘data-driven’. This means that they want to make decisions based on facts that come from data. To do this, they frequently need sensitive data from other parties in the chain. These could be personal data or competition-sensitive data. At the same time, there is increasing awareness and enforcement of privacy rules (e.g. GDPR) and data breaches represent a growing risk. This often causes conflict in practice, so that many organisations are unable to obtain the insights that they seek in order to operate in a genuinely data-driven fashion. The time is therefore ripe for a new way of sharing data, solely in order to gain insight and not to obtain the underlying data.

Various sectors face obstacles to data-sharing

Examples of sectors where this data-sharing problem is a hindrance:

• To conduct medical research, it is often necessary to combine data from several healthcare parties, such as a hospital, an insurer and a GP. But can researchers manage to sort out all the legal matters necessary to obtain the patient data they need for their research? Both the government and the financial sector need to overcome fraud and this also often requires data from other sources. But is it permitted to share those data if one cannot prevent them from taking on a life of their own?
• Companies are keen to benchmark themselves or their suppliers. But doesn’t this mean that others will learn too much information as a result, which will undermine a company’s competitive position?

In all these examples, there are great advantages in being able to obtain the results of an analysis with the help of the Linksight platform, without also obtaining or having to share the underlying data.