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by edgyquant 1001 days ago
> There is a real argument on the other side, though

No there isn’t. The rest of your comment can be safely disregarded thanks to you opening with this.

“We need to build a better tomorrow!,” we will, the people actually trying to within accepted norms. Not SV grifters who’ve destabilized our entire society and ended privacy all for ad revenue.

2 comments

Perhaps you should bother to read the rest of the comment. It's not just about a better tomorrow, it's about a better today that we're missing out on because data handling is such a mess in the health sector.

I have a higher risk of death because health data handling sucks. That's a trade-off. You might like that the status quo is what it is, but it doesn't mean the trade-off isn't real.

Is there not a win-win situation through post-quantum homomorphic encryption? I'm not an expert in the area, but I imagine it's possible to set up a centralized system that contains pretty much all patient data for a nation, in a completely encrypted state. Then each institution/hospital could apply for access to make an application which generates only an aggregated metric of interest as an output, such as the map example given above, which could provide real-time notifications to medical personnel in the area.

I realize that many will come to say that the homomorphic encryption capabilities right now require a long time and many CPU cycles to compute some plaintext equivalent, but there would still be a huge improvement in the time required to be notified in the world today.

Additionally, performing studies in academia would likely be a far better experience if the data was available in a single place, and aggregate information could be gathered with a single API.

Sadly, I doubt that any of the luddites in the room (or French regulators) will be willing to trust the technical solutions to the problems...

Differential privacy has the same problem: users have to trust that it's applied appropriately, which doesn't help with the vocal group who say we can never trust anyone who makes their paycheck by touching computers, or anyone who lives in California, or...