We live in a world of "checkbox compliance." Companies spend billions on GDPR and HIPAA compliance, filling out forms and appointing officers, yet data breaches continue to rise. Why? Because regulations regulate human behavior, but they do not change the physics of data.
The Flaw of Policy-Based Privacy
Policy-based privacy relies on trust. You trust the hospital employee not to look at the file. You trust the cloud provider not to peek at the memory dump. You trust the firewall not to have a zero-day vulnerability. In a sufficiently complex system, these trust assumptions always break.
Physics-Based Privacy
Zektra advocates for "physics-based privacy"—privacy guaranteed by mathematics. When data is homomorphically encrypted, it is not just "policy-compliant" to keep it private; it is mathematically impossible to view it without the key.
This shift from "don't look" to "can't look" is the only way to solve the privacy paradox. It allows us to satisfy the spirit of regulations like GDPR—protecting user rights—while removing the friction that currently stifles innovation.