You’re making the assumption that the entity with the data, and the entity that wants to process that data are the same entity.
An obvious use case for ZKP’s, which is under active research, is allowing medical data from institutions like the NHS to be processed by research organisations and pharmaceutical companies. Allowing pharmaceutical and research organisations to extract useful medical data from large populations, without requiring the handover of personal medical data.
In that situation the owner of the data has a clear incentive to use ZKP’s (they’re required to protect medical data), and so does the data processor (they can extract new inferences from previously inaccessible, but extremely large, datasets). There’s obviously a clear profit motive as well, and given the cost of medical research, the use ZKP’s doesn’t seem unreasonable.
What is an example of a real use case for such where the data owner would rather do orders of magnitude more compute to generate the results in the fancy new ZKP format, compared to hosting a simple API that processes the exact same queries and returns the exact same amount of information as the adversary would get in the ZKP strategy, but using classical means?
Your again making the assumption that the data owner know what queries people want to execute, and is also happy to pay for all the compute involved in running those queries. There is no “simple API” that’s gonna let you remotely run machine learning training on someone else’s hardware, or let you perform any other kind of large dataset analysis.
Converting data into a ZKP format is a one time cost, that can be shared by many different data processors.
Again you’re making the assumption the data owner wants to get into that game. I seriously doubt the NHS in the UK have any interest in becoming a SaaS provider.
An obvious use case for ZKP’s, which is under active research, is allowing medical data from institutions like the NHS to be processed by research organisations and pharmaceutical companies. Allowing pharmaceutical and research organisations to extract useful medical data from large populations, without requiring the handover of personal medical data.
In that situation the owner of the data has a clear incentive to use ZKP’s (they’re required to protect medical data), and so does the data processor (they can extract new inferences from previously inaccessible, but extremely large, datasets). There’s obviously a clear profit motive as well, and given the cost of medical research, the use ZKP’s doesn’t seem unreasonable.