There’s a Chinese joke that used to be spread around — usually by word of mouth. I have tried to translate it and hope I didn’t overbake it.

One day, Johnny got a cold call from a real estate agent: “Morning Sir, would you be interested in our new property? It’s an absolute bargain, price to rocket soon. Trust me before it’s too late!”

Johnny (impatiently): “I have several mortgages already. I have run out of cash.”

Agent (after 2 seconds): “Then, are you considering selling one or two? You should act before the price starts to collapse!”

Johnny (surprised): “Actually, I am totally broke and can barely afford to rent a basement.”

Agent (sympathetically): “I’ve got a part-time job opportunity. Ticket scalper, $50 per day. Interested?”

Johnny, while very impressed by the guy’s sales skills, cold-bloodedly hung up on him and blacklisted the phone number outright.

It’s too bad I didn’t have the honor to speak with such a talented salesman but, lately, I’ve been bugged by such cold calls quite frequently.

Where on earth did these guys get my phone number?!!! What about my privacy?!!!

Have you ever shopped online? Have you booked a fancy dinner via some apps? Have you made an appointment with your doctor online?

Tell me, what haven’t you done online? Still wondering how these cold callers get your personal information?

I cannot name a single friend of mine that hasn’t suffered from personal information leakage. Furthermore, as information technology improves and data continues to become the new-type economic value generator, without the proper means, the situation may deteriorate.

Large internet companies collect data from the online footprints of users, who are the rightful owners of the data, to predict the end-user’s online behavior. This includes shopping, entertaining, healthcare, insurance, and banking. Almost every aspect of their daily life.

Some firms have certain protection methods, while some don’t really care. It is sad but true.

And now, as usual, it’s my routine blockchain lobbying time. Here are some solutions, among others, which are backed by different tech logic but aim to solve one single problem — how can data be monetized without hurting the true data owners’ feelings?

Homomorphic Encryption (HE), is…uh…, a form of encryption that allows computation on ciphertexts, generating an encrypted result which, when decrypted, matches the result of the operations as if they had been performed on the plaintext. Excuse me?

Forget about it, let’s take a look at an analogy made by American computer scientist Craig Gentry, who is well known for his work in fully homomorphic encryption.

A jewelry store owner Alice is very precautious about the potential risk that her employees might steal the rough diamonds during the assemble process. So, she came up with this idea of making a glove box for which only she holds the key, and in which her employees can assemble the raw materials into finished products.

Consider: Alice as the end user, the rough diamond as the original data, the key as the blockchain network, the locking of the glove box as homomorphic encryption, and the employees assembling the jewelry as computing.

Ta-da! The finished product, of course, is the computing result. Many thanks, Mr. Gentry!

Next, Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP), is a method by which one party (the prover) can prove to another party (the verifier) that — wait, again?

Of course, we need another analogy — the Ali Baba cave.

Johnny and Tracy made a bet. The former claimed to know the secret word to open the magic door shut in the ring-shaped cave and in between the two separated paths, but he declined to share the secret with the latter. So, he entered into the cave via the left path, and waited by the magic door at the farthest end for Tracy to randomly tell him to come out of the cave via either the right or left path. If she called for Johnny to leave through the right path, then he would need to use the secret word to go through the magic door and back around to the exit. If she called for him to exit through the left path, then he can just walk back to the left exit. Is it starting to make sense?

In the beginning, there’s a 50% chance for Johnny to guess correctly, but what if they repeated the process for an infinite number of times? The chance of coincidence would be infinitely close to zero.

Much clearer? Many thanks, magic Ali Baba!

There are others, such as Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Let me put it this way, regardless of the various technology approaches, this is what they are essentially trying to do:

I can prove to you that I hold the key to this glass room, but I don’t want to show you what the key looks like. What am I gonna do? I open the door with the key and fetch the LEGO Porsche 911.

You got me — I am running out of analogies. But, do you feel slightly more positive about the future of personal information protection? I do.

(I kinda look forward to getting a cold call from the skillful agent, if it’s real. Isn’t that hilarious?)