Apple already slurps everything you do with their "privacy proxy" services, so what more risk do you want? Apple defaults for forwarding all dns and web pages via their proxies, they just can't seem to figure out what to do with it.
The concerns here are valid but the fact the authors label this being about Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute really devalues their credibility in general.
Siri doesn’t have any of the new AI features, the prompts they’re using have been around for years, and private cloud compute has always been about Apple Intelligence generative features.
I'm somewhat disappointed that the authors did not realize that apple-relay.cloudflare.com is not PCC, but is publicly known to be part of iCloud Private Relay.
That made me immediately think that there were other parts of the article which were not properly investigated, and likely a fair bit of sensationalization.
I would like to make a broader comment: perhaps as users we should ask what AI features even make sense to use? Starting last year I experimented heavily with Google Gemini interacting with Google WorkPlace apps. The technology was cool, and is even much better now, but I came to the conclusion I don't really need it.
For an iPhone local AI, I wrote an app for myself (although I think there are maybe 10 other people who use it) that chats with Apple's local model (that is fairly good) and switches to a Secure Enclave model on their servers and from the documentation it looks like using the cloud model is private and secure.
Even better now, I signed up for ProtonMail's optional Luma LLM Chat system with integrated private web search tools. It is surprisingly good, and I trust Proton that it is private.
Almost the only thing I frequently use commercial LLMs for now is a few times a week using gemini-cli for coding, and NotebookLM a few times a month, plus occasional Gemini use, but I pay for Luma (powered by Mistral models) so I routinely use it for AI search use cases.
Just because technology is incredibly cool, this doesn't mean that we have to use it if real productivity gains are slim or non-existent.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 20.3 ms ] threadI wish I had some time to play with it
Siri doesn’t have any of the new AI features, the prompts they’re using have been around for years, and private cloud compute has always been about Apple Intelligence generative features.
"Siri is collecting all your data!"
insert company advertisement
That made me immediately think that there were other parts of the article which were not properly investigated, and likely a fair bit of sensationalization.
For an iPhone local AI, I wrote an app for myself (although I think there are maybe 10 other people who use it) that chats with Apple's local model (that is fairly good) and switches to a Secure Enclave model on their servers and from the documentation it looks like using the cloud model is private and secure.
Even better now, I signed up for ProtonMail's optional Luma LLM Chat system with integrated private web search tools. It is surprisingly good, and I trust Proton that it is private.
Almost the only thing I frequently use commercial LLMs for now is a few times a week using gemini-cli for coding, and NotebookLM a few times a month, plus occasional Gemini use, but I pay for Luma (powered by Mistral models) so I routinely use it for AI search use cases.
Just because technology is incredibly cool, this doesn't mean that we have to use it if real productivity gains are slim or non-existent.