Google Starts Offering Privacy Enhancing Technology for Free

Google has a number of interesting programs that can be used for a wide range of purposes, but in spite of the fact that this is the case many of these features are not available for the general public. It seems like Google is looking to change that by making two of its most prominent privacy enhancing technologies, or PETs for short, open source and therefore free for anyone to use with all things having been considered and taken into account.

This is all part of Google’s new initiative called Protected Computing. One of these security enhancing features is called Magritte, and it is focused on videos. It leverages machine learning to figure out what objects need to be obscured, and it then automatically blurs them to give the subject a higher level of privacy than might have been the case otherwise.

Such a feature is useful because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up blurring things like license plates as well as people’s faces. People making videos usually need to take a lot of time out to do the blurring manually, but with all of that having been said and now out of the way it is important to note that this new tech will help them get it done in a much shorter duration.

This blurring tool is not the only one that people can now utilize. An FHE Transpiler is also on the cards, and it can allow you to conduct analyses of data sets without having to decrypt personal or private information. This will really come in handy for financial services and the like, and it will be interesting to see what the adoption rate is among such industries.

PETs have become a hot topic as of late, so it was only a matter of time before Google got in on the action. Tech like this will become increasingly important moving forward because privacy will be a larger issue. As more and more people get online, preserving privacy will be sacrosanct and Google will want to take center stage on that front.