this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
44 points (94.0% liked)

Privacy

33268 readers
700 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] drspod@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The author only mentions homomorphic encryption in a footnote:

Notes:

(A quick note: some will suggest that Apple should use fully-homomorphic encryption [FHE] for this calculation, so the private data can remain encrypted. This is theoretically possible, but unlikely to be practical. The best FHE schemes we have today really only work for evaluating very tiny ML models, of the sort that would be practical to run on a weak client device. While schemes will get better and hardware will too, I suspect this barrier will exist for a long time to come.)

And yet Apple claims to be using homomorphic encryption to provide their "private server" AI compute:

Combining Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption in the Apple Ecosystem

Presumably the author doubts Apple's implementation but for some reason has written a whole blog post about AI and encryption and hasn't mentioned why Apple's homomorphic encryption system doesn't work.

I'd be quite interested to know what exactly is the weakness in their implementation. I imagine Apple and everyone who uses their services would be interested to know too. So why not mention it at all?

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

Might be the difference between FHE and regular HE. I don't know a lot about this subject, but if HE was more practical, I'd expect to see it a lot more, outside of ML too.