In June 2025, researchers from SafeInsights and SEERNet joined a diverse community of technologists, legal scholars, public sector leaders, data stewards, and researchers at the 2025 Summer Institute hosted by the Massive Data Institute (MDI) at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The convening focused on the responsible implementation of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) across sectors with particular attention to education and workforce systems. Over three days, participants shared practical strategies, explored emerging tools, and addressed the legal and organizational dimensions of PET adoption.
While the Institute introduced new tools and techniques, it also prompted a shift in perspective—showing that the most urgent challenges are not always technical.
The Institute began with a clear message: Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are not just technical tools—they are essential for safeguarding individual privacy and building public trust in integrated data systems. This emphasis reflects a central concern of the Massive Data Institute: how to expand secure access to administrative and linked datasets while maintaining strong privacy protections. Speakers, including health informaticians, computer scientists, lawyers, economists, and agency leaders shared how PETs are being integrated into real-world projects. Participants described the use of privacy-preserving record linkage to integrate health and housing data, the deployment of synthetic datasets in federal statistics, and PET-based strategies to link education and workforce data in the absence of common identifiers. The event also featured examples of privacy-aware credentialing and trusted research environments in digital learning.
Participants engaged in hands-on demos with open-source PET tools such as OpenDP, PySyft, synthetic data generators, and record linkage kits. These sessions allowed participants to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying technology and clarified technical tradeoffs. For example, one workshop involved creating synthetic datasets and running privacy risk metrics. Seeing how small changes in parameters affected both privacy protection and analytical usefulness helped clarify the kinds of decisions researchers and system designers face when implementing PETs.
As several speakers emphasized throughout the Institute, PETs cannot be developed or deployed in isolation. Effective use requires coordination among legal, technical, and organizational teams.
While education research was less represented, several projects illustrated how PETs can support secure research access to learning data. For example, SafeInsights Data Enclave, a trusted research environment (TRE), is designed to enable privacy-preserving research on STEM education using digital learning platform data. It balances data access and privacy, supports researcher collaboration, and builds safeguards into its infrastructure. Similarly, Western Governors University shared efforts to implement privacy-aware credentialing systems that link learning outcomes to workforce skills while protecting student data.
These examples demonstrate how PETs can be adapted to support research in education settings, particularly when trusted environments and appropriate governance models are in place.
When we first arrived at the Institute, we expected the main focus would be on solving technical challenges—things like tuning differential privacy parameters or optimizing secure multiparty computation. However, across sessions, a different theme emerged: the more persistent challenges are legal, organizational, and institutional. Many conversations centered on how to develop governance structures that support responsible data sharing, how to align with legal frameworks, and how to prepare organizations to use PETs effectively.
This reflects experiences in our own work at Digital Promise. Technical barriers exist, but it is often more difficult to navigate institutional approval processes, reconcile different interpretations of compliance, and gain the support of partner organizations. These constraints can delay or limit the ability to use existing PETs in research practice.
For initiatives like SafeInsights and SEERNet, the implication is clear: continued investment in technical infrastructure must be paired with attention to policy, legal, and organizational enablers.
The 2025 MDI Summer Institute offered a useful venue for examining the current landscape of PETs across sectors. It highlighted ongoing efforts to use these technologies in practice and drew attention to the legal and institutional conditions necessary for scale. For researchers working in education, the event provided examples of how PETs can be used to balance data access with privacy concerns.
Responsible use of PETs will require ongoing collaboration—not just among technologists, but also with legal teams, institutions, and researchers committed to privacy and access.
This project is supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305N210034 to Digital Promise. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.