With Fully Homomorphic Encryption it's nobody elses.

The basic idea of of the project is to remove the need for trust.

It's FHE for "cryptographically-secure private AI inference" not for every other service where they snoop into your behavioral information.

This kind of attitude is really disrespectful of decades of progress in cryptography. Without even considering homomorphic encryption, classic encryption is specifically designed to make intermediate nodes such as ISP dumb pipes that do not know the contents of communication. The ISP can store your communications on their server however they want.

If you don’t agree with this model, I’m afraid modern cryptography doesn’t have anything to offer.

The linked project page [1] claims to be fully homomorphic. Assuming the claim holds (I haven't verified it), then there is provably no way for Google or anyone else to obtain any information from the encrypted data or computation performed on them.

FHE is traditionally horrifically slow, so it's hard to imagine running anything beyond toy models with it. They list some applications on the original article page, but (presumably) they must be dramatically stripped down in order to run within any reasonable time budget. This is not going to run anything like a Sol/Opus any time soon.

[1]: https://heir.dev/

Related, I'd seen this blog [0] posted on HN a few years back that gave a nice run down on the "programmable cryptography" space which introduce FHE and a few other neat concepts. Really enjoyed the read and learned some new terms.

[0] https://0xparc.org/blog/programmable-cryptography-1

100% not an expert but my understanding was that part of what you are proving by signing the computation is that the computation itself was performed specifically as agreed to. I may be mixing this up with zero knowledge proofs.

they could have gone with an oblivious transfer approach (where it's working on what looks like multiple problems at once, you don't know which)

Eh? With secret sharing one can do computation on a shared secret where it is provable that no individual party can recover any information about the data with their share alone.

I don’t see why you conclude that FHE couldn’t be close to as secure as that. (Like, not information theoretically, but with computationally bounded adversaries.)