Irish data firm Truata wins international privacy tech challenge

31 Mar 2023

Image: Truata

The company’s technology was used to test other PET submissions for vulnerabilities, scoring Truata a £40,000 prize for its efforts.

Data analytics company Truata has won an international challenge for its privacy boosting technology.

The company scored first place in the Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET) Challenge, in the Red Team category. The award included a prize of £40,000.

The Dublin-headquartered company said this challenge aimed to encourage the use of PETs to address global societal challenges, such as detecting financial crime and boosting pandemic responses.

Trūata said teams in the Red Team category were allowed to attack the submissions of challenge participants and verify the strengths of their privacy claims. Submissions were analysed and tested in attack simulations to find potential vulnerabilities.

The awards were announced at the second Summit for Democracy, a virtual event hosted by the US to help make democracies more “responsive and resilient”.

The Irish company entered in the UK section of the competition and reviewed four submissions. Truata tested these submissions using Calibrate, its privacy risk assessment product that can quantify sources of risk in original datasets.

The data analytics company was able to highlight several areas of potential weakness and show areas of improvement within submissions.

Truata CEO Felix Marx said the company wants other businesses to have the “confidence to implement forward-thinking data strategies”, which use data in a responsible and ethical way.

“This award win is testament to the commitment to privacy and data protection from our data science team,” Marx said. “It also showcases the potential of privacy-enhancing technologies to bring clarity to an organisation’s customer data through automated risk assessment.”

Co-founded by Mastercard and IBM in 2018, Truata focuses on privacy-enhancing technologies for privacy risk assessment, de-identification, and the “true anonymisation of data”. The company announced a hiring round of 75 staff the year it was founded.

In 2020, Marx shared his views on the evolving data privacy market, the importance of being flexible and the specifics of his leadership role within Truata.

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Leigh Mc Gowran is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com