alt Hacker NewsFHE might allow arbitrary computation, but I use most services because they have some data I want to use: their search index, their knowledge, their database of chemicals, my bank account transactions, whatever.
So unless Google lets me encrypt their entire search index, they can still see my query at the time it interacts with the index, or else they cannot fulfill it.
The other point is incentives: outside of some very few, high-trust high-stakes applications, I don't see why companies would go through the trouble and FHE services.
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Exactly what I thought. In the end it really isn't in most of the big corps interest to not see your data/query. They need/want to see it so why would they degrade their ability to do so if they can just say no and you will have to rely on using their services without FHE. For banking applications cool, everyone else debatable if it will ever be accepted.
You're right about incentives, but wrong about the first part. Private lookups of a plaintext database are possible and have been for a while now (5+ years?). The problem is it often requires some nontrivial preprocessing of the plaintext database, or in the worst case a linear scan of the entire database.
Here's an implementation of a fully private search engine using FHE that allows querying Wikipedia with the server remaining oblivious as to what you're reading: https://spiralwiki.com/
From what I understand, only the sensitive data needs to be encrypted (e.g. your bank transactions). It is still possible to use public unencryped data in the computation, as the function you want to compute doesn't have to be encrypted.