Ifmeaningful homomorphic encryption was an option, then we'd be living in a quite different world.
Very true. I was just making a tongue-in-cheek conjecture about the justification/rationalization that might be employed.
Surprisingly, homomorphic encryption is now practical enough to run a Kaggle-like data science competition, but without disclosing data. At least one such competition is known to run with real money prize.
This reads like fake smoke and mirrors to trick investors/data providers/participants instead of anything that's real cryptographically.
As rad as it would be if Google started doing privacy-friendly-ish datamining on user data by homomorphically encrypting it, you and I both know that's not what they're doing. You forgot the `/s`, sadly.