[captn3m0]

Age verification (without leaking other PII) was the illustrative scenario for W3C Verified Credentials (it lets you use a validating authority to sign specific subset of your schema).

There’s lots of other ways to solve the problem for verification/signing use cases tbh. Homomorphic encryption shines best when you are looking at more complex calculations than just a Boolean result - such as tax calculations.

Can you submit your financial information and have your taxes calculated without revealing the amounts involved? Can you apply filters to an image without having the image readable by the server? It essentially allows us to “trust a remote server” in scenarios where one wouldn’t usually.

[jkhdigital]

Still doesn’t quite justify homomorphic encryption if the computations involved are mundane (like tax calculations). The true use case is when the computation itself is proprietary, so that users don’t want to reveal their data but the provider also doesn’t want to divulge their algorithm. This is why ML models or finely tuned search engines are the examples most commonly cited, but of course those are also far outside the scale that could be achieved.