Personal data security is paramount in safeguarding individuals’ privacy, fostering trust in digital interactions, ensuring legal compliance, preserving business continuity, and protecting against cyber threats. By prioritizing data security measures and adopting a proactive approach to risk management, organizations can uphold their obligations to data subjects, maintain their reputation, and thrive in today’s digital world through the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs). PETs adopt engineered systems such as secure multiparty computations, homomorphic encryption, anonymisation, differential privacy, mix networks, anonymous digital credentials etc., that provide acceptable levels of privacy. They are information security techniques that enhance privacy, protects and reduces the risk of personal data exposure to unauthorized third parties. They incorporate primary data protection principles by minimising the usage of personal information, maximising data security, and empowering data subjects. PETs play a vital role in aiding organizations achieve and maintain compliance with data protection laws and regulations, especially as it relates to data security. In Nigeria, the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) requires data controllers/processors to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security, integrity, and confidentiality of personal data in their possession or under their control, in addition to adhering to global principles of data processing. PETs could help data controllers/processors under the Nigerian regulatory purview achieve compliance in this regard. In this article, we examine the benefits of PETs and how data controllers/processors can effectively leverage on these tools to attain data protection compliance in Nigeria.

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