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Your database technology is interesting but has the problem that there is a legitimate use case for a company having access to at least some of the data on its
by TimPC 4y ago
Your database technology is interesting but has the problem that there is a legitimate use case for a company having access to at least some of the data on its servers. It is impossible to optimize a service without transparency into what it is providing and which of those results are useful. Companies spend a good deal of time and effort, arguably even over-optimizing for this, but many applications which don't do it at all are crap. Any product based on this technology lacks the data to do any form of recommendations and most services these days consider recommendations an essential component.
- Comevius 4y agoThe point is that people would have the option to opt-out of or opt-in to privacy, when that makes sense. Not every company would offer those options, but no company can today, except for cloud storage where client-side encryption can be considered practically secure in many, but not all cases. For a database client-side encryption unfortunately cannot provide adequate protection.
- TimPC 4y agoFair but the parent comment referenced Facebook as an example and I think it's fair to say Facebook is rather dependant on content recommendation to the point where they wouldn't use the technology at all.
- api 4y ago> It is impossible to optimize a service without transparency into what it is providing and which of those results are useful. People created excellent UIs in the "shrink wrap" software era before people even had network connections. In fact, many would argue that some of these UIs were simpler and cleaner and overall better. Oh wait... if by optimize a service you mean optimize it for engagement (addiction, triggering, controversy) then I agree.
- TimPC 4y agoExcellent UIs for shrink wrap software. I think we can agree that the UI for Netflix or YouTube depends on content recommendation in ways that shrink wrap software doesn't. One person's engagement (addiction, triggering, controversy) is another person's usability. If YouTube is going to recommend entirely Fox News videos to an apolitical user it's not going to provide a good interface. Even search is hard to do properly without data. How is YouTube useful if it can't do recommendations and you can't search it?
- api 4y ago> I think we can agree that the UI for Netflix or YouTube depends on content recommendation in ways that shrink wrap software doesn't. I can imagine a lot of interfaces for sites like that which do not require personalized feedback at all. In fact, a rich search feature allowing me to say what I want to find would usually be preferable to an opaque recommendation engine designed to steer me toward content the site wants me to visit.
- TimPC 4y agoSure, but how do you build a rich search feature if you are unable to extract features from the private content?
- api 4y agoThe idea the OP put forward is a database that allows "blind" searches. So I could, for example, search for articles between dates X and Y without revealing X or Y or the content or actual date of any article. The results of the search would be encrypted. There is disagreement in the cryptography community about the extent to which this is actually possible. I've seen a few proofs that the obvious "magic" version of this where you can directly but blindly search is impossible because you could use search criteria to reconstruct the content, but that only rules out the most obvious implementation strategies. There's a lot of research going on with this kind of thing in the cryptographic community that involves leveraging zero knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and so on. Nothing practical enough to make anything like a blind SQL database though. In any case I was arguing against the claim that this would preclude good UI/UX design if it were in fact possible.