The UN is Testing Technology That Processes Data Confidentially 21
How to analyse data without revealing their secrets? From a report: Data are valuable. But not all of them are as valuable as they could be. Reasons of confidentiality mean that many medical, financial, educational and other personal records, from the analysis of which much public good could be derived, are in practice unavailable. A lot of commercial data are similarly sequestered. For example, firms have more granular and timely information on the economy than governments can obtain from surveys. But such intelligence would be useful to rivals. If companies could be certain it would remain secret, they might be more willing to make it available to officialdom. A range of novel data-processing techniques might make such sharing possible. These so-called privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) are still in the early stages of development. But they are about to get a boost from a project launched by the United Nations' statistics division. The UN PETs Lab, which opened for business officially on January 25th, enables national statistics offices, academic researchers and companies to collaborate to carry out projects which will test various PETs, permitting technical and administrative hiccups to be identified and overcome.
The first such effort, which actually began last summer, before the PETs Lab's formal inauguration, analysed import and export data from national statistical offices in America, Britain, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, to look for anomalies. Those could be a result of fraud, of faulty record keeping or of innocuous re-exporting. For the pilot scheme, the researchers used categories already in the public domain -- in this case international trade in things such as wood pulp and clocks. They thus hoped to show that the system would work, before applying it to information where confidentiality matters. They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data. That is mathematically complex, but possible. The findings are then sent back to the original inquirer.
The first such effort, which actually began last summer, before the PETs Lab's formal inauguration, analysed import and export data from national statistical offices in America, Britain, Canada, Italy and the Netherlands, to look for anomalies. Those could be a result of fraud, of faulty record keeping or of innocuous re-exporting. For the pilot scheme, the researchers used categories already in the public domain -- in this case international trade in things such as wood pulp and clocks. They thus hoped to show that the system would work, before applying it to information where confidentiality matters. They put several kinds of PETs through their paces. In one trial, OpenMined, a charity based in Oxford, tested a technique called secure multiparty computation (SMPC). This approach involves the data to be analysed being encrypted by their keeper and staying on the premises. The organisation running the analysis (in this case OpenMined) sends its algorithm to the keeper, who runs it on the encrypted data. That is mathematically complex, but possible. The findings are then sent back to the original inquirer.
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A native English speaker realises that data is plural.
Re: What? (Score:1)
Re: What? (Score:1)
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And actually in thinking about it, data can be used both ways as "the data is" and "some data", but it's never used as "the data are".
It is in the UK, which is how most of Europe learns English.
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Somebody bought a grammarly account and actually said yes to every suggestion.
Anybody that's used that software will get what I mean immediately.
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This is the most incomprehensible submission I've ever seen. I have no idea what's trying to be communicated.
The UN wants your data.
If you trust the UN, give them access to your data.
Homomorphic encryption? (Score:1)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
"Homomorphic encryption is a form of encryption that permits users to perform computations on its encrypted data without first decrypting it."
Not the only way, but then the information should be secure while handled and processed by outside people. Who could have specialized hardware like tons of GPUs to speed results (to amortize the cost). Or allow many remote people to rent their hardware out for processing anonymous data.
Yeah the example above (submission) being physical
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Regarding the grocery stores, a lot of people are really tired of being an "essential worker" while getting paid near minimum wage. It's no wonder workers can't be found.
Not just retail though. Teachers are over it. Healthcare workers are over it. EMT and police are also over it. People are deciding other jobs might be better and it's now hard to find workers in these fields for a variety of reasons.
I think it's kind of funny myself. When enough people feel they are treated poorly enough over a long enough
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What I don't get is why they say it is mathematically complex to run an algorithm over the data when the people running the algorithm have the keys to decrypt it. So, it should be no different from any other set of queries run against an encrypted database. It's done transparently with SQL a billion times a day...
Someone is about to have all their data stolen (Score:2)
I mean our data. Someone is about to have all our data stolen.
Is this homomorphic encryption? (Score:2)
The article is paywalled. Is this an application of homomorphic encryption [wikipedia.org]? Where they can search the data, but the data remains encrypted? This is a better use of it than enhancing DRM.
schema (Score:2)
Simple metric: the UN is not to be trusted (Score:3)
The press release is gibberish so let me translate: "We at the UN feel very strongly that our past massive corruption is not a predictor of future massive corruption. Give us your data."
Remember the UN is made (Score:2)