Well, alike all other technologies, it needs to leave the lab first.
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Privacy
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Can you explain what Homomorphic Data is?
I am interested
My basic understanding is that the concept of homomorphically encrypted data allows for processing of said encrypted data without the need for prior decryption.
Hence, it enables computations and processing on encrypted data (ciphertext) that yield results matching those from the original data (plaintext) without the data needing to be decrypted at any point.
Why would any company use this in the first place?
The general public is not going to pay a subscription (ew another subscription?) they’re just going to use the free services. “I already pay for internet”
There is no reason for anyone to use this, as amazing as it is. That ship sailed long ago and the moment an MBA gets wind of what this’ll mean for the data broker industry, it will be lobbied into illegality, at least here in the US.
It’s probably wrong to assume that the general public will be sensitive enough to privacy to force companies to compete on that terrain.
But it’s a fascinating topic and I hope to see it in practice at some point.
It’s just too slow , hopefully it gets much faster.
I don't believe this will work? I would have to see an actually working example though. With actual data, not matrix vector multiplications those are trivial.
Doing math on garbled numbers and then reverse garbling it? Easy. Doing text parsing on garbled text? Probably impossible, but I'd loveto be proven wrong. I also think you have to reveal what kind of functions you want used?
The homomorphism in category theory is often shown by a commutative diagram, where you can go from a point to another by interchanging the order of operations. In the below diagram for FHE, you can go from (a, b) to E(a*b) in two separate ways.
Even in math this doesn't work for all problems.
It works in the sense that the operations are performed on binary numbers, so text handling works the same way it normally does assuming the handler function is encrypted to match. Once you have multiplication and addition, you can make logic gates and general computing follows from there - although with the noise being amplified thru each logic gate, the more complex the functions the more bootstrapping is required and the less I see this being doable in the short term.
For a working example, check out apple’s homomorphic encryption page, they use it for landmark identification and afaik will be using it for siri whenever they get to that update. It’s slow but it’s already usable - I’m not personally convinced it’ll be used everywhere, but the technology is super cool and I hope it shows up more
Yeah, but why would Facebook kill their own business model?
They wouldn't have to. They just release a ToS update, that no one reads, that gives them the right to look at all of the data sent for "optimization", or some other nonsense.