Usable and Efficient Secure Multiparty Computation

The second round of interviews has now been conducted, the results analysed and published in deliverable 1.4. This time five people from different sectors in Estonia were interviewed. The interviews focused on the following aspects:

• assessment of potential barriers to adoption of SMC identified in the first round of interviews;
• gathering user feedback on the statistics demo;
• further mapping of potential use contexts of SMC;
• probing the feasibility of two use case scenarios.

As a result five main baseline conditions of adoption with corresponding barriers to adoption were identified:

• Being sufficiently/insufficiently informed
• Presence of perceived need/existence of a functional substitute
• Presence/absence of task-technology fit
• Sufficient amount/lack of resources
• Good organizational fit/avoidance of uncertainty.

SMC's potential advantages and disadvantages were also assessed in relation to existing practices of data handling:

• Anonymisation prior to giving data to research
• Anonymisation by research team
• Data filtering combined with anonymisation
• Keeping data and user separate
• Delegating data operations to the third party
• Limiting the research problem
• Providing a secure pathway to data
• Making data sharing obligatory by law.

Read the full results here.