Ant Group makes privacy computing framework open source to drive adoption of its technology
- Ant Group has released the source code for its SecretFlow framework on open source code hosting platforms GitHub and Chinese alternative Gitee
- Privacy-preserving computing is becoming increasingly important, with 60 per cent of large organisations set to use at least one related technique by 2025
The framework, which is meant to preserve user privacy while conducting data analysis and machine learning, is designed to “address pain points in multiparty collaboration on information flows”, Ant said in a statement.
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At the same time, Ant also launched a privacy computing fund with the China Computer Federation. The fund will initially invest more than US$600,000 to support cutting-edge research in this area, which includes the post-quantum multiparty computation and the security of other open source privacy-preserving computing platforms.
“It is costly for developers to start from scratch, as there are many fundamental technologies involved in the privacy-preserving computing process,” said Lei Wang, general manager of Ant’s privacy computing department.
Demand for privacy-preserving computation is growing as the world becomes increasingly digital. By 2025, 60 per cent of large organisations will use at least one privacy-enhancing technique in analytics, business intelligence or cloud computing, according to market research firm Gartner.
Ant has sought for years to gain wider adoption of its technology by sharing it with developers. In 2019, it posted to GitHub its SOFARegistry, a low-latency service registry, which is a type of database for app data structures. In 2015, the company also released Ant Design, an interface design language that was also made available on GitHub.
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Other Chinese Big Tech firms have also made projects open source, as the country seeks to develop such communities and play a larger role in setting technical standards.
