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Comment by jazzyjackson

1 month ago

This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not?

I would be surprised if doing noisy vector comparisons is actually the most effective way to tell if someone is in front of the Eiffel tower. A small large language model could caption it just as well on device, my spider sense tells me someone saw an opportunity to apply bleeding edge, very cool tech so that they can gain experience and do it bigger and better in the future, but they're fumbling their reputation by doing this kind of user data scanning.

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jazzyjackson

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do_not_redeem  1 month ago

> This must be the first consumer or commercial product implementing homomorphic encryption is it not?

Not really, it's been around for a bit now. From 2021:

> The other major reason we’re talking about HE and FL now is who is using them. According to a recent repository of PETs, there are 19 publicly announced pilots, products, and proofs of concept for homomorphic encryption and federated analytics (another term for federated learning) combined. That doesn’t seem like a lot … but the companies offering them include Apple,7 Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, and users and investors include DARPA, Intel, Oracle, Mastercard, and Scotiabank. Also, the industries involved in these early projects are among the largest. Use cases are led by health and social care and finance, with their use in digital and crime and justice also nontrivial (figure 1).

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology...

I do wonder why we don't hear about it more often though. "Homomorphic encryption" as a buzzword has a lot of headline potential, so I'm surprised companies don't brag about it more.

  • fragmede  1 month ago

    But what are the products from them that implement HE and that consumers are using? Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Google have all released libraries for HE, and there's Duality SecurePlu, but as far as actual consumer products, Apple's caller ID phone number lookup and other features in iOS 18 is very possibly the first.

    As far as why it's not more of a buzzword, it's far too in the weeds and ultimately consumers either trust you or they don't. And even if they don't trust you, many of them are still going to use Apple/Google/Facebook system anyway.