Could Synthetic Data Be the Future of Data Sharing? - CPO Magazine

Synthetic data generation (SDG) is rapidly emerging as a practical privacy enhancing technology (PET) for sharing data for secondary purposes. It does so by generating non-identifiable datasets that can be used and disclosed without the legislative need for additional consent given that these datasets would not be considered personal information. Having worked in the privacy and data anonymization space for over 15 years, the limitations of traditional de-identification methods are becoming more evident. This creates room for modern PETs that can enable the responsible processing of data for secondary purposes. There's a growing appetite from CPOs to understand where SDG fits as a PET, how it's generated, what problems it can solve, as well as how laws and regulations apply. In a nutshell, synthetic data is generated from real data.