Google Returns to Federated Learning Over Privacy Concerns

Google has created the first federated learning and distributed differential privacy system with formal guarantees against an honest-but-curious server. However, a fully malicious server could still bypass the privacy guarantees by manipulating the public key exchange or introducing fake malicious clients, said researchers in a recent blog post.  In 2021, Google started using federated learning to train Smart Text Selection models, an Android feature to select and copy text easily by predicting what text users want to select and then automatically expanding the selection. Since the launch, Google has improved the models’ privacy by combining secure aggregation (SecAgg) and a distributed version of differential privacy.  The recent development is all thanks to an honest-bu