> Nowhere in the news they say it is offline
Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”.
How else could the information be kept private?
I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.
> conversations aren’t saved on Mozilla’s servers by default, and partners like Mistral agree to zero data retention.
I don't read this as offline ...
People only read the headline, and the headline lies.
> Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”.
Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
So does duckduckgo with their duck.ai. No outrage there.
I mean encryption is a real thing (Edward Snowden sometimes would simply say "Encryption works" in online Q and As) and there are ways to do zero knowledge data crunching Eleven while interacting with servers. Kim DotCom famously launched Mega as a zero knowledge file host after his legal issues with with megaupload, and lots of apps and services across the internet have been doing the version of this even with online services in the ensuing decade and a half. For instance I use StandardNotes which is online but encrypted.
I have no idea the extent to which any of that speaks to the Mozilla thing in this context, and local is preferable if that's achievable. And of course you should always do due diligence on what exactly is and isn't being promised when it comes to sending your data to the cloud, it certainly is possible to do that in privacy preserving ways. It's not a doubt about the technology so much as a question of institutional credibility.
New apple watch markets their new listening feature as private, but they are not happening on device.
>like Apple’s Private Relay
Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)
(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)
Private here means "trust me, bro".