The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) published a TechDispatch on secure multi-party computation (SMPC), read the article on the EDPS site. From the summary in the article:

Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) is a field of cryptography that enables different organisations to collaborate with their data while keeping their information private. The use of advanced cryptographic techniques allows different participants to compute shared results and gain insights without revealing any individual data.

This is particularly valuable in fields such as medicine and finance, where organisations can benefit from jointly processing the data that each organisation possesses, whether client or patient data, but cannot, or do not want to, share it among themselves for different reasons (data protection, security or commercial interests). For instance, being able to determine whether an experimental treatment produces similar side effects across multiple institutions could provide crucial insights without requiring any organisation to share its underlying data.

While highly beneficial for researchers, the use of SMPC also matters for the individuals whose data is involved. By enabling organisations to develop improved services and products without sharing personal data across multiple parties, SMPC supports more privacy-preserving forms of collaboration and challenges the traditional notion that data needs to be directly accessed in order to be used.