Immeasurable hunger for data demands increasingly intensive protection

Pfungstadt, February 6, 2025 - Will even more personal data soon be stored by authorities, research institutions or health insurance companies, for example? If Friedrich Merz's latest ideas are anything to go by, yes. He is proposing that health insurance companies grant their members a discount if they make their patient data available electronically. This is just one example of many; there are numerous efforts of this kind. The police and border guards also want more data so that they can work more efficiently. Regardless of the debate about right, wrong, ethical or fair, the state and the economy will not be able to escape the benefits of targeted and AI-supported data collection and analysis if they want to keep pace with other regions of the world. In many cases, the results of large-scale data collection and analysis can even be justified, provided they are not used arbitrarily or with malicious intent.

"The most important point in this discussion is to talk about data security. Any personal or secret data needs to be protected from those who are unauthorized to read and process it or who even have cybercriminal acts in mind. This principle applies to existing data pools as well as to future data collection, for example in healthcare or law enforcement. Only targeted data encryption can help in this context. It is the best way to protect sensitive data of any kind, anywhere and especially in the cloud," says Ömer Tekin from encryption specialist eperi.

It is clear to data protection experts that simple encryption is not effective. This is because either the data cannot be processed in an encrypted state or the data would have to be decrypted for processing, which would severely disrupt data protection. The sensible alternative is function-preserving data encryption. This means that applications for data processing or analysis only have access to very specific data fields. And even this data access is subject to seamless tokenization, which means that data protection is guaranteed throughout, even in the event of a cyberattack resulting in the theft of the data.

In short, no one will be able to escape the data greed of our time in the long term and for this reason alone, those responsible should act with foresight and set the necessary course.