We live in a world where we always expect things to happen seamlessly. Every time somebody walks into a café and signs in to the free WiFi and opens their Instagram or TikTok to stay up-to-date with trends and friends or retrieves a discount from a retailer by joining their newsletter circulation, rarely do they stop to think about how that convenience and value is derived.
Technology is the key enabler working away in the background, and developers and DevOps teams are making that happen. Underneath the slick interfaces of the apps and websites that provide these highly efficient and personalized experiences is a complex machine that relies on data to fuel it, built by developers and delivered by DevOps teams.
In many ways, data is a two-way exchange, and those end-users that are aware of this give and take appear to be happy with how the relationship works.
Indeed, several surveys in recent years suggested that the majority of consumers are happy to share their data with companies if it improves their experience. Furthermore, a significant minority are still comfortable if they have no control over who sees their data, there is no clarity around how data is stored and used, even if the organization in question has a poor reputation for data privacy.
The Privacy Balancing Act
So, if most people already accept data trade-offs in some shape or form, should developers still care about building applications and solutions that guarantee data privacy?
The short answer is yes, but as developers, that involves a tricky balancing act.
Although sharing data has become commonplace in exchange for benefits and value, consumers are becoming more aware of privacy issues. Take the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) as an example. Over the past five years, awareness has more than doubled in notable European markets such as the UK, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and France.
Meanwhile, there is also commercial pressure, as employers rely on developers to innovate to remain profitable. At the same time, customers expect brands to be responsible with their data, and failure to do so at the expense of trying to commercialize a new application could be detrimental. Indeed, while the pandemic may have ushered in significant changes and altered consumers’ attitudes toward data privacy, end users remain unwavering about the importance of security.
Maintaining this balancing act is becoming increasingly complex to achieve. However, the question of data privacy is becoming a key business priority, and that means developers have a big opportunity to show their commercial value to their organizations. Indeed, companies cannot afford to get the balance wrong, and developers are central to creating the perfect formula.
In fact, the privacy conundrum has been around for a long time.
When the internet was created, privacy was not considered an issue because all content accessed online was deemed to be public. Nothing was encrypted; the introduction of email complicated things, not least because anybody on the internet could, theoretically, intercept personal data and read private messages.
This prompted the emergence of the cypherpunks, a group of cryptographers who began to contemplate what the future of digital privacy might and should look like. They started to create the tools they believed the world needed to safeguard data privacy–today, their mission is carried on by developers who value user privacy.
Why Developers Need to Be Familiar With FHE
However, securing the transmission of data is not enough, as many breaches still occur because data isn’t encrypted during processing.
So, in a world where more and more data needs to be shared to deliver the sort of experiences consumers expect, is it inevitable that privacy and security will be compromised as the volume of data exchanges grows? Not necessarily.
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers a solution, allowing developers to build applications and run services without needing to see or secure the underlying data. This is because FHE enables data to be processed blindly without having to decrypt it at any stage. FHE offers a way for developers to maintain that all-important balancing act between maintaining privacy and offering value to both business and customer.
In FHE, to guarantee a user’s data privacy, all data is encrypted by the user with their own secret key. Users of a particular service, such as an online medical portal, will use a secret key to send their encrypted data to a server where blind processing takes place. The result is also encrypted and sent back, the user again using their secret key to decrypt the information.
What this means is that, because data is encrypted end-to-end, the company providing the service can do so in a way that keeps the same customer experience, even though they cannot see the data that is being shared and sent back. From a security perspective, this is also critical. Governments, attackers and service providers cannot see the exchanged information because they do not possess the key–they also cannot break it, as the encryption used in FHE can resist attempts made even by powerful quantum computers.
Privacy can also be protected during larger-scale data exchanges that underpin collaboration between organizations and nation-states on numerous strategic programs, with each contributor able to add their value knowing that their intellectual property and sensitive information is not compromised.
Looking ahead, if developers can embed FHE into their practices on a broad scale, then a key milestone for privacy is within reach. Rather than being viewed as an objective relating to digital interactions, privacy can be treated as a naturally occurring by-product of every application, piece of software and service that the developer community creates.