They've certainly engaged in a lot of privacy theater before. For example

> Apple oversells its differential privacy protections. "Apple’s privacy loss parameters exceed the levels typically considered acceptable by the differential privacy research community," says USC professor Aleksandra Korolova, a former Google research scientist who worked on Google's own implementation of differential privacy until 2014. She says the dialing down of Apple's privacy protections in iOS in particular represents an "immense increase in risk" compared to the uses most researchers in the field would recommend.

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-differential-privacy-short...

That's a fine bit of goalpost shifting. They state that they will make their _entire software stack_ for Private Cloud Compute public for research purposes.

Assuming they go through with that, this alone puts them leagues ahead of any other cloud service.

It also means that to mine your data the way everyone else does, they would need to deliberately insert _hardware_ backdoors into their own systems, which seems a bit too difficult to keep secret and a bit too damning a scandal should it be discovered...

Occam's razor here is that they're genuinely trying to use real security as a competitive differentiator.

The first release set should be downloadable now for inspection. (It's binaries only, source is released for select components)

That could be said of any device you own, ever.

Actually Apple has stated they are allowing security researchers to look at their infrastructure DIRECTLY.

That doesn't mean they get to know what happens inside the ICs.

Looking at a bunch of PCBs doesn't tell you much.

They haven't done this.

Does that mean you just don't bother encrypting any of your data, and just use unencrypted protocols? Since you can't inspect the ICs that are doing the work, encryption must all also be security theater.

Oh? https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/25/apple_private_cloud_c...

> "Today we’re making these resources publicly available to invite all security and privacy researchers – or anyone with interest and a technical curiosity – to learn more about PCC and perform their own independent verification of our claims."

https://security.apple.com/documentation/private-cloud-compu...

There are also a million dollars of bounties to be had if you hack it

They mean that security researchers can look at the code, not the hardware at the transistor level.

They did say that people can come look at the hardware too, but we can all understand why that's not a fully open competition for logistical reasons if nothing else.