Privacy

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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.

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Cryptographers Just Got Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches (www.wired.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

" three researchers have crafted a long-sought version of private information retrieval and extended it to build a more general privacy strategy. The work, which received a Best Paper Award in June 2023 at the annual Symposium on Theory of Computing, topples a major theoretical barrier on the way to a truly private search."

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Let’s take a moment and acknowledge that it was never hard to make searches private.

It’s just that doing that requires trusting a company not to fuck with you behind the scenes and sell you out, and ensuring that doesn’t happen is fucking hard

[–] [email protected] 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

requires trusting a company not to fuck with you behind the scenes

The point of this cryptography is that you don't have to trust the company implementing it not to do that, as long as you trust the software doing the retrieval.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 7 months ago

Unless you do it all yourself, it will never be trustless.

Just like your favorite phone app, in the end you will have to trust the actual code, and you will have to trust that the actual app on your actual phone is from the actual source they claim. Do you feel lucky?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Actually, to make it with cryptographic guarantees is pretty hard... I know of at least one university professor in the PET (Privacy Enhancing Technologies)/cryptography space who spent quite some time on his startup to develop such a search engine. In the end it all fell apart because of one the mathematical assumptions being unprovable. This is just one example but I guess it illustrates pretty well why we've yet to see a cryptographically secure/private search engine as a product!