Privacy Computing: Insights from Ant Group’s Pioneering Researchers and Their Innovations

April 26 marked the 22nd World Intellectual Property Day, underscoring three key developments: the 2021 enactment of China’s Personal Information Protection Law and Data Security Law, the rising demand for privacy‑computing talent, and China’s dominance in global privacy‑computing patent rankings, with Ant Group leading.

The article introduces privacy computing as the core technology that enables organizations to extract data value while safeguarding personal privacy. It follows several Ant Group engineers—Wang Li, Wang Lei, Fang Wenjing, and Li Lichun—who share their experiences from early research to large‑scale product deployment.

Wang Li, algorithm lead of the “YinYu” (隐语) framework, describes how privacy computing locks sensitive data without hindering its utility, recounting early challenges, team dynamics, and the evolution from concept to a unified trusted computing platform that integrates MPC, TEE, and homomorphic encryption.

Wang Lei’s perspective highlights how new regulations have elevated privacy computing’s priority in industry collaborations, with applications ranging from medical insurance settlement to broader AI and data‑analysis scenarios.

Fang Wenjing illustrates the interdisciplinary culture of the team, noting how continuous patent filing, paper reading, and cross‑domain expertise (cryptography, mathematics, hardware) drive innovation, and how the team’s achievements earned multiple championships at the iDASH competitions.

Li Lichun’s “MOSS” team built the Ant Chain MOSS product, the first large‑scale commercial privacy‑computing solution in China, now serving dozens of industries and hundreds of institutions, with hardware‑integrated devices showcased at major tech expos.

The narrative emphasizes the importance of collaborative research, relentless patent work, and the balance between performance, security, and usability, positioning privacy computing as a pivotal technology for future data‑driven services.