A faster way to preserve privacy online

Searching the internet can reveal information a user would rather keep private. For instance, when someone looks up medical symptoms online, they could reveal their health conditions to Google, an online medical database like WebMD, and perhaps hundreds of these companies' advertisers and business partners. For decades, researchers have been crafting techniques that enable users to search for and retrieve information from a database privately, but these methods remain too slow to be effectively used in practice. MIT researchers have now developed a scheme for private information retrieval that is about 30 times faster than other comparable methods. Their technique enables a user to search an online database without revealing their query to the server.