Comment by max_
1 year ago
Homomophic encryption simply means that the data is encrypted in a way that the person working with it cannot use it arbitrarily.
Here is an example, I would for instance use Google Maps for Navigation but Google or any other third party would have no idea where I am going.
I used it in the first company I worked for and it works beautifully.
A) and B) work but they are not as effective as homomophic encryption.
Barring regulation, why would car manufacturers currently profiting off the sale of this data spend extra money voluntarily implementing something that cuts off their revenue stream?
Or why would one car manufacturer cut off a revenue stream that their competition has.
The keyword here is "use".
Homomorphic Encryption reduces the breadth of computations that can be ran on the gathered data, by making it inaccessible outside of the specific homomorphic scheme that was chosen. So yes, in that sense it cannot be used arbitrarily.
However, the results, i.e. knowledge derived, from the chosen computations can still be shared arbitrarily, which IMO is a much greater issue, as the need of the result sharing will inform the computations that can be done within the scheme.
Who defines the computations? Surely not the users, and lacking regulations, also surely not regulatory bodies.
> use Google Maps for Navigation but Google or any other third party would have no idea where I am going
You don’t need homomorphic encryption for this, just local route processing. In the case of car data, the auto companies aren’t doing any useful processing of the data for the user. Homomorphic encryption is irrelevant.