CHAPTER 7	Conclusions















In Chapter 1, we presented a rationale for the particular agenda -- personal privacy -- 
that drove the architectural design in Chapter 2, the security issues addressed in 
Chapter 3, and the sample application in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5, we demonstrated 
that the result appears to meet its design goals without forcing privacy and functional-
ity to be traded off against each other. Finally, in Chapter 6, we investigated some 
work related to this research, exploring other matchmakers, decentralized systems, 
and explicitly political systems. In this chapter, we shall draw some general conclu-
sions about the work presented here.



We have demonstrated that starting from a social or political agenda can have wide-
ranging effects on how technology is designed. This research has shown that carefully 
protecting the personal privacy of users in a broad class of applications can lead to a 
design which is technically superior in several respects -- indeed, the decentralized 
nature of the design, its reliance on strong cryptography, and many other design ele-
ments seemed inevitable once the underlying agenda was chosen. The result indicates 
that, for a large class of potential applications, protecting privacy does not necessarily 
require that one make a tradeoff between privacy and either robustness or functional-
ity.



It is hoped that the widespread availability of this research will lead to commercial 
and legislative chnages in several viewpoints, including



o	the relation of technology to issues of personal privacy, and



o	the utility of strong cryptography.







This is, after all, the fundamental goal of the research -- while Yenta is an important 
and useful application, and while its use can serve as both an advertisement for the 
underlying concepts and also help solve real problems for real users, it is the architec-
ture and the rationale for its development which are the most important issues here.



As discussed in Section 5.9, one of the enduring issues concerns getting those with 
financial incentives in their users' lack of privacy to adopt the technology discussed 
here. The Yenta application itself, by serving as an example and by raising awareness 
of the issues, may help in this regard. However, it is only the first step along a long but 
ultimately rewarding path.