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Comment by henearkr | Hacker News Reader

If it's encrypted and only you have the key, then it doesn't matter where it's stored. You can even publish it, it would just be random gibberish without the key.

They just need to ensure that's the client side that deciphers the data, and that the private key never leaves the browser side neither. I think that can be audited through JS debug tools.

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I have zero faith in a system that relies on giving keys to the layman without backups. People already lose their phsical keys all the time. Digital keys will get lost a lot more often and you will end up with lost patient records. You will need to provide a backup option, which in turn makes encryption obsolete.

Sounds great in theory, but in practice end users suck at key management. Just look at how many Bitcoin wallets are gone forever because the wallet owner lost the private key.

It would need to be audited one each time the browser downloaded the JS. Otherwise, the server can trivially decrypt the data by serving malicious JavaScript once the audit is complete.

Anyway, this is Google. There’s no way they’re planning to client-side encrypt. Even if they did, they’d eventually realize it wasn’t generating enough indirect ad revenue to be too big to kill. At that point they’d ungracefully shut it down.

> If it's encrypted and only you have the key, then it doesn't matter where it's stored.

Until advances in mathematics or computation obsolete the crypto. We might decide that it doesn't matter within each respective patient's lifetime (a debate) but that is getting longer and longer.

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