Meet the expert: Freya de Mink to speak at #RISK Amsterdam

Taking place at RAI Amsterdam on September 27 and 28, #RISK Amsterdam examines the trends and best practices organisations are employing to navigate today’s rapidly evolving risk landscape.

Freya de Mink is Business Development & Healthcare Lead at Roseman Labs. A fast-growing Dutch privacy tech provider, Roseman Labs enables organisations to collaborate without exposing sensitive source data, with a software solution based on multi-party computation (MPC). 

In her role, Freya is focused on commercial development and solutions for health and healthcare. She has a background in strategy consulting at Boston Consulting Group, and holds an MBA from London Business School.

Freya will be at #RISK Amsterdam to discuss the technologies on the horizon that organisations should prepare for, and how these technologies can be implemented to best effect.

We spoke with Freya about her professional journey and for an introduction into the themes on the table at her #RISK Amsterdam session.

Could you outline your career pathway to date?

My career started at the Boston Consulting Group in 2015, where I joined with a degree in musicology and gender studies. In 2022, I completed an MBA at London Business School. 

During my years at BCG, I worked on strategic topics across a range of sectors and got increasingly interested in advanced data science solutions. I experienced first-hand how lack of data can be an inhibitor for value creation, for example in the context of value-based healthcare. Protecting privacy is a must, especially when sensitive data is involved.

At the same time, high value often lies in combining and working with data from different sources. Since joining Roseman Labs in 2022, I have a found a solution for this challenge and my job is to help grow the adoption of our collaboration software among healthcare organisations.

What are the main privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) that organisations will be adopting over the coming 12 to 24 months?

In today’s area of secure data collaboration, Multi-Party Computation (MPC) offers without doubt the strongest combination of privacy properties and broad analytics features for substantial data sets. 

While hardware-based techniques (such as Trusted Execution Environments) continue to reveal vulnerabilities from a confidentiality point of view, other cryptographic techniques (in particular, Fully Homomorphic Encryption) are facing very high computing costs and are not ready for use on large datasets. 

With leading organisations such as the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre using MPC to collaborate with more than one hundred organisations, I expect that more organisations will follow.

What are the primary benefits and challenges that adoption of some of these PETs present?

The primary motivation for organisations to consider PETs is that they want insights from data which they do not have. With MPC, organisations get the opportunity to combine and analyse data, without exposing the underlying records. This opens the door to using sensitive data sources which would otherwise be inaccessible. 

Challenges that I have seen are what you could expect among adopters of a cutting-edge technology: it takes time to explain and build trust among stakeholders. These include privacy officers, security specialists and data experts. 

A great help in this regard is that increasingly, large organisations such as the United Nation, EU commission and data protection authorities publish guidelines and recommendations around working with PETs.