Data is one of the most powerful assets nowadays. Besides being an analytic tool, it’s tradable, and buyable, as companies and institutions all around the globe seek to be the best at what they do, and information on what, how, and when people act is key to being number one. Now how can data be used to save energy, or even create synergies in the medical research field without ever having to experiment with animals or people? Digital twins might be — one — answer to it. By digitally replicating something with high accuracy, one can easily foresee consequences and obstacles, but also ways to mitigate them, and how to make the most of them.
What are digital twins?
Digital twins are virtual models of things from the real world, which can be people, objects, and even entire cities. They are used to better understand the consequences and effects of certain actions in real life and can be used for virtually anything, from predicting the success rate of a new drug based on a patient’s medical history to enhancing a powerplant’s production by digitally mimicking it.
Main issues
The logic can be replicated in countless other industries, with endless use cases. All this sounds incredibly positive and useful, but it’s easy to see some technical, ethical, and even security issues, namely when it comes to sensitive data breaches. There’s a debate going on regarding privacy when it comes to digital twins. Developers and engineers need to retrieve real-world data to be able to build a truthful system, and that’s not possible without gathering personal information.
Confidential Computing & Blockchain to the Rescue
In theory, Confidential Computing could be used to tackle some of these problems in the sense that it allows you to retrieve relevant and useful data without ever disclosing sensitive raw data, such as people’s identities. If we go back to the new drug case again: the pharmaceutical company could retrieve all the relevant data from the patient’s medical records without ever uncovering details that are unnecessary for its research, such as his name, address, etc.
Blockchain technology aims to be public by default, but some projects — Integritee included — are paving the way to foster privacy without compromising transparency. This means the technology’s architecture remains the same but is empowered with privacy-based features. Why? Because no one wants to have everything out in the open all the time. Privacy is needed in countless areas, especially when it comes to personal information and confidential data that can’t be disclosed.