Organization Behind Latvian's Encrypt Start System for Data Collection

The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), the organization behind certificate authority Let's Encrypt, will soon launch a new system that can collect data in a privacy friendly way. Prio is described as a system that collects aggregated statistics such as application data with respect for privacy, without the need for parties to have full access to the data of individual users.

Applications and websites normally send data from users back to the developer. Prio splits the data into two anonymized and encrypted parts and uploads each part to different data processors, who do not share the data with each other. This way the data processor only has limited information about the original data.

Each data processor processes the received data into a subset. The sub sums can then be combined to a final aggregation. In this way, statistics can be created about the complete data, revealing only minimal information from individual users to the data processors, according to the ISRG. The software used for Prio is open source.

"Just like Let's Encrypt, it protects people without them having to know anything about it," says ISRG director Josh Aas. Prio will start soon.