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.
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.
I'm excited about the attempt at privacy because I'm on "Team Keep Siri Dumb". I like dumb Siri. It reliably meets most of my needs, setting timers and managing house lights. I'd rather Siri stay dumb and I would never opt-in to ChatGPT Siri as some of my family has, but if Siri "has to" get smart to survive, I will celebrate whatever privacy wins are still available as my only hope that smarter Siri is not something I need to just disable entirely (and lose my "friend" in charge of my timers and house lights in the process).
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 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).
