Tech giants such as Google and Microsoft have been increasingly under scrutiny over data security issues. To work on such issues, Google, Microsoft and Intel have come together along with seven other companies to work on data protection issues.

The consortium, which is called the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), will work on creating a balance between defining and accelerating open source tech and protecting consumers' data.

"CCC is a project community at the Linux Foundation dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing. It will embody open governance and open collaboration that has aided the success of similarly ambitious efforts.. The effort includes commitments from Alibaba Cloud, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent," the consortium states on its newly launched website.

Simply explained, this consortium takes data security to a new paradigm – open source tech whose purpose is to further data security.

Microsoft, Intel and Red Hat have already announced their software development kits and platforms that will be freely available to developers to create data protection tools. For example, the consortium will provide developers with a Microsoft framework, which will help developers write code in Trusted Execution Environments.

The Linux Foundation will be the central authority regulating and hosting the consortium.

Regarding the function of the consortium, Microsoft states on its cludblog website, "Protecting data in use means data is provably not visible in unencrypted form during computation except to the code authorized to access it. That can mean that it's not even accessible to public cloud service providers or edge device vendors. This capability enables new solutions where data is private all the way from the edge to the public cloud." This indicates that it will work towards encrypting data while it is in direct use.

While this is a start, it remains to be seen how large tech firms actually work towards this end. None of these organizations have their hands clean. The largest companies in the consortium, Google and Microsoft, have time and again been accused of violating data privacy and using user data for marketing.

It remains to be seen whether CCC will leave an impact on how data security works.

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