It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.
With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.
From the Apple security blog:
> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.
there is no cloud, it's always someone else's computer, so technically someone who is physically in google/apple datacenter at the exact moment your data is being operated on, hypothetically would have a chance to steal your data.
saying that because google owns the hardware, they would quietly not delete or copy your data is quite a wild accusation.n
pardon my ignorance, but why does compute hardware pose any security concerns?
It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.
With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.
From the Apple security blog:
> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.
there is no cloud, it's always someone else's computer, so technically someone who is physically in google/apple datacenter at the exact moment your data is being operated on, hypothetically would have a chance to steal your data.
saying that because google owns the hardware, they would quietly not delete or copy your data is quite a wild accusation.n