Comment by kennywinker 19 hours ago
That was their goal, but in the past couple years they seem to have given up on client-side-only ai. Once they let that go, it became next to impossible to claw back to client only… because as client side ai gets better so does server side, and people’s expectations scale up with server side. And everybody who this was a dealbreaker for left the room already.
Given the snowden leaks, i think it’s naive to believe that any data that leaves your phone is NOT ingested by gov data collection.
Maybe private in the sense that it isn’t funneled into your ad profile, but not private in the sense that nobody else can access it.
I stated that I am not naive and am not entirely convinced by Apple's sales pitch that the Private Cloud Compute containers are encrypted with keys in a way that only your hardware device can read in such a way that the PCC is an extension of your device.
I just think it is useful that Apple is trying something along those lines and wishful the guarantees work half as well as they claim they do, because that's a good goal to have in theory even when it fails in practice against dedicated threat actors.
And yes, to be fair my personal day-to-day threat model currently is much more concerned with the evil advertising company known as Google than it is with government actors. Even if Apple's Private Cloud Compute only means "private from Google" that's still a win for me (and most of the information I was looking for when I saw this headline, because my first fear was that the advertising company Google was involved).
You're excited together with a handful of other privacy enthusiasts on HackerNews.
I would think for the vast majority of users out there this is not a concern at all.
Apple until now failed to even get the basics done and make Siri smart, despite marketing "Apple Intelligence" as the core feature of 2024's iPhone.
Apple thinks they can get a best-of-both-worlds approach with Private Cloud Compute. They believe they can secure private servers specialized to specific client devices in a way that the cloud compute effort is still "client-side" from a trust standpoint, but still able to use extra server-side resources (under lock and key).
I don't know how close to that ideal they've achieved, but especially given this announcement is partly baked on an arrangement with Google that they are allowed to run Gemini on-device and in Private Cloud Compute, without using Google's more direct Gemini services/cloud, I'm excited that they are trying and I'm interested in how this plays out.