Hacker News Reader

> I'd say when the data is observed is when it becomes surveillance.

If I recall correctly, that was exactly the US government's defense after the 2013 Snowden leaks revealed it was tapping every internet connection possible and sucking in every piece of data available.

View on HN

It depends on the meaning of "observe." What if the data is secret-shared among many independent parties, so that no single party (or even a group of parties smaller than some threshold) can process it in any way? This is a common model for using MPC to protect privacy while collecting user data; in fact the first real-world MPC deployment was organized in this manner.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com