InfoQ Homepage Data Privacy Content on InfoQ
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Google Introduces VaultGemma: An Experimental Differentially Private LLM
VaultGemma is a 1B-parameter Gemma 2-based LLM that Google trained from scratch using differential privacy (DP) with the aim of preventing the model from memorizing and later regurgitating training data. While still a research model, VaultGemma could enable applications cases in healthcare, finance, legal, and other regulated sectors.
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The European Cloud Dilemma: Innovation Versus Digital Sovereignty
European tech companies are facing a tricky situation, using popular American cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud, but worrying about keeping control of their data in Europe. With rising geopolitical tensions, more practitioners are asking: should we be less dependent on American tech giants? It's got some European developers and businesses rethinking how they handle their data.
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Guardian's Secure Messaging: Open Source Messaging Uses Millions of App Users as Traffic Cover
The Guardian has recently released Secure Messaging, a highly secure and user-friendly tool designed to protect journalistic sources by concealing the very fact that messaging is occurring. The open source project achieves strong plausible deniability by generating bait traffic through the routine activity of existing users of The Guardian's mobile app.
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AWS Unveils Independent European Governance and Operations for European Sovereign Cloud
AWS unveils its European Sovereign Cloud, launching in Brandenburg, Germany, by 2025, with strict EU governance and a focus on digital sovereignty. This initiative features an EU-controlled parent company, dedicated Security Operations Center, and customer data residing exclusively in the EU, ensuring compliance and operational autonomy while leveraging AWS's innovative cloud services.
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DeepMind Researchers Propose Defense against LLM Prompt Injection
To prevent prompt injection attacks when working with untrusted sources, Google DeepMind researchers have proposed CaMeL, a defense layer around LLMs that blocks malicious inputs by extracting the control and data flows from the query. According to their results, CaMeL can neutralize 67% of attacks in the AgentDojo security benchmark.
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European Cloud Providers: What Are the Options Today?
Current geopolitical tensions have raised attention to existing cloud providers in Europe, with many European companies increasingly concerned about reliance on US-controlled services. According to various articles by specialists and practitioners, local cloud providers still offer few viable alternatives for organizations focused on European digital sovereignty.
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Google Enhances Data Privacy with Confidential Federated Analytics
Google has announced Confidential Federated Analytics (CFA), a technique designed to increase transparency in data processing while maintaining privacy. Building on federated analytics, CFA leverages confidential computing to ensure that only predefined and inspectable computations are performed on user data without exposing raw data to servers or engineers.
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Rachael Greaves at QCon London: Ethical AI Can Decrease the Impact of Data Breaches
At QCon London, Rachael Greaves, chief executive officer at Castlepoint Systems, presented both the obligations and benefits of data minimisation as a mechanism to decrease the impact of data breaches. AI autoclassification and automatic decision-making tools help with the ever-increasing data volumes as long as ethical principles are considered, allowing decisions to be challenged.
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AWS Announces European Sovereign Cloud for Government Agencies and Regulated Industries
AWS has recently announced that it is working on a European Sovereign Cloud, a new European region that will be operationally independent of all existing AWS regions. No availability date has been provided for the new option that targets government agencies and regulated industries that store sensitive data and run critical workloads in the European Union (EU).
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AWS Announces Clean Rooms for Secure Collaboration with Analytics Data
During the recent re:Invent conference, AWS announced the preview of Clean Rooms for analytics data. The new service provides safe environments where multiple customers can securely share and analyze data with control of how the data is used, reducing the risk of sharing personal data.
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Unraveling Techno-Solutionism: How I Fell out of Love with “Ethical” Machine Learning
At the recent QCon San Francisco conference, Katherine Jarmul gave a talk on unravelling techno-solutionism, in which she explored the inherent bias in AI training datasets, the bias that assumes there will be a technical solution to almost any problem and that those technical solutions will be beneficial for mankind. She posed questions for technologists to consider when building products.
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Open-Source Constellation K8 Engine Aims to Bring Confidential Computing to Kubernetes
Constellation is a Kubernetes engine that shields Kubernetes clusters from the rest of the cloud infrastructure using confidential computing and confidential VMs. This creates a confidential context that ensures data is always encrypted, both at rest and in memory.
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Google Brings Confidential Computing to Latest C2D and N2D Machine Types
A few months after upgrading its general-purpose (N2D) and compute-optimized (C2D) virtual machines to adopt the latest AMD EPYC technology, Google is now making confidential computing available in preview on those machine types.
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PipelineDP Brings Google’s Differential-Privacy Library to Python
Google and OpenMined have released PipelineDP, a new open-source library that allows researchers and developers to apply differentially private aggregations to large datasets using batch-processing systems.
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Austrian DPA Ruling against Google Analytics Paves the Way to EU-based Cloud Services
In a recent ruling, the Austrian data regulator declared the use of Google Analytics unlawful based on EU GDPR regulation. While the ruling is very specifically argued and worded, its implications go well beyond this particular case.