The latter is more like it. It is a case where you want something computed, like the sum of your paychecks over the last year, Or some credit card risk evaluati

The latter is more like it. It is a case where you want something computed, like the sum of your paychecks over the last year, Or some credit card risk evaluation thing, or if you have markers for cancer in your genome data based on your personal information. Instead of sending these values to the server (perhaps encrypting in flight) where they are processed in plaintext (open to malicious intent on the server-side, or honest-but-curious folks who mine your sensitive personal information) the values, you upload remain encrypted so only you know what they mean. However the cloud side can sum them, perform threshold evaluations, search for things, determine fitness for a loan etc, without knowing anything, they go through the motions of the computation for you, but without being able to decipher anything about the computation result at any step along the way. Then when the server-side is done, it has computed whatever you asked it to do, but knows nothing. The server side reliably and deterministically manipulated symbols in a language it cant read. As it turns out, you can, so when the encrypted server-side results are sent back, you decrypt them and understand if you have been approved or have genetic markers for cancer or something.