Privacy enhancing computation.

  Privacy enhancing computation.

Privacy can be defined as being free from public attention. It is a basic human right. In other words, privacy is being protected up to some level, since both too much privacy and losing privacy can be disastrous.

Though most of the world respect a person’s right to act freely, throughout the history privacy has been invaded due to a person’s characteristics or beliefs or their possessions by influential people or organizations because more data means more power. When your privacy is protected, those who wish to harm you, may not know how to attack or when to attack. To put it in another way, when exposed you may become an easy target which can result in ending a peaceful lifestyle.

Have you been observed or disturbed by people without your approval?
If yes, even given the chance, one must have the courage not to do what is done to them.
Are you a victim?
You remember how you felt, don’t you? Yes, devastating.

Therefore it is important to have a technology to protect privacy in this digital world. There is no precise meaning of what privacy enhancing computation is. It can be defined as a set of different technologies which help to achieve the highest level of personal safety protection. The most common privacy enhancing technologies are Homomorphic Encryption, Secure Multiparty Computation, Differential Privacy and Trusted Execution Environment.
Among them, ‘Homomorphic Encryption’ is the most secure privacy enhancing technology whereas the ‘Trusted Execution Environment’ is the least secure one.

Providing the ability to process data by a general index without the need for personal information is homomorphic encryption. Those who have the particular keys to the required part of data can unencrypt it by performing various calculations. Moreover third party providers are able to compute on encrypted data. That is to say that the data is confidential but they can be processed. A trusted execution environment which is also known as TEE provides a high level of security when storing or processing data. TEE monitors whether your device trusts other devices and allows or prohibits access to location, photo gallery, and other data for third-party providers and other applications. Other than that TEE is a very safe environment for main device. In secure multi party computation, the data from multiple parties can be shared and analyzed, and neither party can see the initial data. What’s more it is a cryptographic protocol that allows to analyze data without violating privacy. Differential privacy works as an algorithm which analyzes data and generates statistics. Not only it hides individual data but also shows a normal data set. This algorithm is not changed due to a person’s joining or leaving the database.

Unfortunately due to the lack of knowledge about these technologies, many people still do not trust modern technological tools.

However, too much privacy also opens paths to criminals to get away from authorities which later on may cause damages to the society.

Privacy enhancing computation enhances privacy and helps to protect data from vulnerabilities and hacker attacks. Not to mention this trend allows to share data while maintaining your security and privacy.

To sum up, privacy-enhancing computation's goal is to keep all data confidential.