The Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) Initiative is a community driven program hosted by the Linux Foundation that develops and supports open source privacy enhancing technologies (PETs). PETs are tools and techniques that minimize the amount of personal data used in computation while maximizing data security and user empowerment. By bringing together experts from industry, academia and the open‑source community, the PET Initiative fosters collaboration and innovation across a wide spectrum of privacy solutions，including secure multi‑party computation, federated learning, homomorphic encryption, confidential computing and other privacy preserving methods. Our long‑term vision is a thriving ecosystem of interoperable PET tools and standards that enable trustworthy data analytics for everyone.
We follow a set of high‑level goals that guide everything we do:
- Enable open collaboration. Provide a neutral home where researchers, developers and organisations can work together on PET research and implementations.
- Advance practical PET solutions. Encourage development of production‑ready tools and frameworks for real world use cases such as healthcare, finance, advertising and more.
- Foster user trust and protect privacy. Help organisations analyse data securely with tools that keep personal information private, demonstrating a commitment to responsible data practices.
- Ensure accessibility and transparency. Adopt open source practices so PETs are accessible, transparent and globally impactful.
- Educate and grow the community. Share best practices, reference implementations and educational resources so PET adoption accelerates across industries.
Our organisation currently hosts three main repositories:
| Repository | Description |
|---|---|
| Privacy‑Enhancing‑Technologies‑Initiative | Home of the PET Initative governance documents, technical charter drafts, meeting notes and community resources. The README outlines the mission and provides links to our mailing list, wiki and meeting calendar. |
| NetDPSyn | Implementation of “NetDPSyn: Synthesizing Network Traces under Differential Privacy,” a system that generates high‑fidelity network traces with differential privacy guarantees. The repository includes data preprocessing scripts, synthesis algorithms and evaluation code as described in the associated paper. |
| SynEval | Implementation of “SynEval: Synthetic Data Evaluation Framework,” a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the quality of synthetic data generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). The repository includes installation, Quick Start, Requirements, Usage, Evaluation Results Description. |
We plan to add more reference implementations and example projects as the PET Initiative grows. If you have a project you’d like to contribute or bring under the PET umbrella, please reach out via the mailing list (see below).
The PET Initiative is governed by a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) as described in our draft Technical Charter. Participation is open to anyone who supports our mission. The community collaborates through:
- Mailing list: Join
technical-discuss@lists.privacyenhancingtech.orgto receive announcements, propose ideas and participate in design discussions. - Public meetings: We hold bi‑weekly technical calls every other Thursday at 10:00 AM PT. Anyone is welcome to attend. Agendas, slides and minutes are posted on the Technical Meetings page and the mailing list.
- GitHub issues and pull requests: Use the issue tracker to report bugs, request features or propose design changes. Submit pull requests to contribute code or documentation. Please read our Contribution Guidelines and Code of Conduct before submitting changes.
There are many ways to help advance privacy‑enhancing technologies:
- Report problems or request features. Open an issue in the relevant repository to describe a bug or propose an improvement. Provide as much detail as possible.
- Contribute code. Fork the repository, make your changes in a branch and submit a pull request. Make sure you have signed the Linux Foundation Contributor License Agreement (CLA) as described in
CONTRIBUTING.md. - Improve documentation. Fix typos, add examples or write tutorials. Good documentation lowers the barrier to adoption and helps others use PET tools correctly.
- Participate in meetings. Join our bi‑weekly calls and working groups. Present your research, discuss proposals and help drive the roadmap.
- Sponsor or support the initiative. Organisations interested in supporting the PET mission can join our list of supporting organisations on the Wiki. See PET Initiative Supporting Organizations for details.
- Project wiki: Detailed design documents, API references, meeting notes and other resources live on our GitHub Wiki.
- Draft governance documents: The current drafts of our Technical Charter, Contribution Agreement and Series Agreement are linked from the project README. These documents define the project scope, governance structure and contribution terms.
- License: All PET Initiative repositories are released under the Apache License 2.0. Contributions must be compatible with this license.
We welcome participation from anyone who shares our vision of a privacy‑preserving digital future. Thank you for your interest in the PET Initiative!
