Apple leases these computers from Amazon like it would from any other colo. Why wouldn’t these servers be considered Apple servers?
Barring a major privacy violation by AWS (which doesn’t seem likely), or some other sort of 0-day hack the data on these servers is entirely private to Apple.
We pay a premium for Apple's privacy restrictions and then end up being tricked to rely on Amazon's. It is false advertisement to say the least....
This is basic logic.
It would be akin to accusing Datapipe or any other provider of pulling drives out of any client with racked servers in their data centers.
Otherwise, they might end up feeling that they were duped by the weasel-words of a sleazy lawyer.
This problem is why enterprise contractual agreements and large compliance systems exist for companies at this scale. Large hosting providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. provide an ability to scale and assurances about risk mitigation, privacy, and availability that are much more viable than each company having to maintain their own private in-house fleets just to create an additional illusion of privacy/security that’s actually no better than tight contractual controls to begin with.
Maybe they need to explain this properly, but servers don’t magically have a lower level of risk just because they’re behind your four walls. In fact, if you lack the experience and expertise, the risk is almost certainly higher depending on your threat model. (And for Apple, their threat model is at the nationstate level. They don’t choose their hosting providers lightly.)
I know HN is very imbued with the cloud approach, and maybe from that perspective running your own servers is just so unthinkable it may as well not exist at all, you don’t get to change how language works. If someone says they’re running on “their own servers” that always means the whole stack including physical and up.
Ownership is determined not only by who pays for it, but also who has direct access to the actual devices.
PRISM
As I recall, this statement was specifically about Apple Intelligence. It was for their AI that couldn’t be done on-device, and wasn’t going to ChatGPT after user authorization.
It was not a general statement that all Apple endpoints are in-house.
And what’s the alternative? Google? Their business model is based on collecting and using user data to increase profits in their AdWords business.
As far as I can tell, the article being discussed made up the ‘fact’ that Apple made such a claim.
I googled the ‘quote’ from the article This raises questions about Apple’s public privacy claim that such system data “never leaves Apple servers or goes to third parties.” and could not find any evidence that Apple actually made that claim. Even the phrase “leaves Apple servers” doesn’t get any hits to statements by Apple.
I also browsed https://www.apple.com/privacy but couldn’t find anything there that’s close to that statement.
The closest I found is a statement about Private Cloud Compute, where they say “If it requires greater computational capacity, it can draw on Private Cloud Compute and send only the data relevant to your task to be processed on Apple silicon–based servers” (https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/)
So, even there they do not claim they own those servers or that they are located in Apple’s data centers, but I think it can be inferred that they own them.
That sounds like it is distributing configuration data from Apple to user's systems. Is there any per-user private data in that?
nicce•4mo ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/03/apple-says-it-uses-amazons-c...