Jan
30
2006Private Information Retrieval
30
2006
There’s a new(?) privacy-oriented trick being cooked up by the true Computer Science brains out there, called Private Information Retrieval. The basic premise is this:
It’s possible to retrieve information from a database in such a way that the database itself has no idea what you were looking for.
If this sounds ridiculous, there is at least one easily understood solution to this problem: Just retrieve the whole database any time you want a piece of info from it.
Clearly, this has, er, scalability issues. PIR research seeks out mathematical tricks to this process far more practical. There are clearly some very interesting practical applications of this technology, such as making your search engine subpeona-proof. Of course, here in the US, we will likely develop DMCA-type laws against the use of PIR.