alt Hacker NewsI don’t have the EU perspective, which might be changed by things like GDPR, but I prefer Apple’s stance that “no one should have this data, not even us”.
One reason is that the data on a user’s phone isn’t solely owned by them. Some of it is shared with other people, or “belongs” to someone else: chat, email, shared documents, photos of people, contact information, etc.
In a corporate environment, this is more explicit: you have access to company information, so the IT department controls what apps you can install / run, because individual EEs won’t always make the best choices.
Second, I think app developers are more likely to share more data, if they know that the shared data doesn’t leave the user’s control. And that (presumably) makes the feature work better. If I’m developing an app, I’ll think twice about indexing any sensitive data, if I don’t know where it was going to end up.
Maybe you missed the 'or sent to private cloud' part of the announcement, it's not just local-llm only.
Don't get me wrong, just like you I personally would also prefer LLM-integrations with a privacy-focused provider and I think Apple is a good party to get that from (assuming they're using good models and keep their privacy guarantees here...)
But in the end you're still often 'sending data to an LLM provider', and the EU enforcing them to also let that be competing LLM providers still doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.
If Mistral would give the same privacy guarantees: great! If a company wants to use their enterprise OpenAI subscription: great! Etc. etc.
Let's allow for some competition here and not force a specific LLM-provider onto users just because they like the Apple hardware and software ecosystem.