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.
I don't read this as offline ...
Pretty ironic then that here, Mozilla is specifically labeling their "we send it all to the cloud" service as "private."
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.
Reading this as “Private Cloud Compute“ (PCC)
(Not iCloud Private Relay, the VPN)