Cryptographers Are Getting Closer to Enabling Fully Private Internet Searches
www.wired.comThree researchers have found a long-sought way to pull information from large databases secretly. If the process can be streamlined, fully private browsing could be possible.
" 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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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
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!
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.
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?