Where are all the cheers? Why Microsoft Presidio needs to be celebrated

As a society, we’re now discussing the role of technology in our lives more than ever. How much information should tech companies have on you? Can social networks influence elections? Are laws, like GDPR, effective to protect privacy and choice? Should parents limit Screen Time for their kids?

These are needed discussions.

I do find, however, when talking about these complex and nuanced conversations, missteps get far more attention than the positive steps forward. And so, that is why, I think projects like Microsoft Presidio need their moment in the spotlight.

What Presidio does

Microsoft’s ambitious open source project, Presidio, promotes privacy by design.

Presidio is a code library that Engineers can use in their software to process information and tag anything that can be used to personally identify (PII) someone. That PII data that is tagged can then be removed before anyone has the opportunity to see it. In practice, a lot of software companies need to store information that happens to have PII data in data warehouses or within analytics without actually needing the PII. That PII information, if compromised, can then be used by others for malicious reasons.