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Hospital saves data about a patient in a theoretical common file that tracks all his health info, but solely belongs to the patient. Insurance wants to add data about some reimbursements for glasses they've done, but should not be allowed to see his medical conditions.

FHE lets you work on the data and update it without ever revealing the contents.

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So, you could do the same with an append-only log with no read permissions?

Accept that, in the case of your append-only log, you need to trust that someone is applying that lack of read permission to themselves. And that they do it well.

Couldn't regular asymmetric encryption take care of that? Just encrypt each entry with the patient's public key.

I think you only need homomorphic encryption if the transformation is something that the owner of data can't or shouldn't do themselves. It would be overkill for simple financial information.

Absolutely. That’s why gp’s parent mentioned working on the patients’ data, not just updating it.

For example, running machine learning models on homomorphically encrypted health data.

*Except that

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