AI Governance Engineer
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Privacy-enhancing technology (PET)

By Updated

A technique that reduces what an attacker, vendor or insider can learn from personal data, such as differential privacy, federated learning, synthetic data, masking or trusted execution 1. None makes a system compliant alone; each has a known failure mode and is evidenced by a test.

Developed in
ch. 19, Privacy-enhancing technologies and their honest limits
Chapters
ch. 19, Privacy & AI
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Where it is used

2 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Differential privacy

    A mathematical guarantee that bounds how much any single person's record can change the output of an analysis or a trained model, tuned by a privacy budget.

  • Federated learning

    Training a model across devices or sites where the data lives, sharing model updates instead of raw records.

  • Synthetic data

    Data generated by a model or simulation rather than collected from people or events, used to augment training sets, test edge cases or reduce exposure of…

Sources

  1. [1] NIST SP 800-226, Guidelines for Evaluating Differential Privacy Guarantees (differential privacy pyramid; privacy hazards). NIST. 2025-03. https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/226/final (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Privacy-enhancing technology (PET). In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/privacy-enhancing-technology-pet. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026privacyenhancingtechnologypet,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Privacy-enhancing technology (PET)}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/privacy-enhancing-technology-pet}
}