>
Google has announced that it has created a new one privacy tool freely available to everyone.
Announcing the Magritte tool in a after (opens in new tab) on the Google Developers blog, the company wrote that the launch will be the latest addition to Google’s Protected Computing Initiative (opens in new tab)which the company claims will fundamentally change “how, when and where data is processed to technically ensure its privacy and security.”
The new tool, which will be available on the open source project repository Github, uses “highly accurate” machine learning to detect identifying objects, such as license plates and tattoos, and automatically blur them.
Google claims Magritte is best placed to help videographers and video journalists protect the privacy of others in the world around them. It emphasized that it has low computational power and its high accuracy makes it a reliable time-saving tool.
Elsewhere, the less catchy “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Transplier,” which aims to let data scientists compute encrypted data without access to personal information, and was first released last year (opens in new tab)has received new circuit optimizations to expand the use cases by ensuring lower computation costs.
The tools are the latest examples of Google focusing on research and development of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) that will be available by June 2022. became a focus (opens in new tab) for the U.S. Government Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
In November 2022, the concept was also featured as part of a contest (opens in new tab) run by the US and UK governments, which asked participants to develop solutions that made it possible to train artificial intelligence models without disclosing personal data, a principle known as differential privacy (opens in new tab).
In 2019, Google made its Differential Privacy Library — a set of tools designed for developer ease of use and, in some cases, such as the Privacy on Beam (opens in new tab) privacy framework, absolute non-experts – available on GitHub (opens in new tab).