Apple's Privacy Promise Is Starting to Look Like a Marketing Slogan

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Apple has built its entire brand identity around privacy. "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone." Billboards. Keynotes. The thing Apple fans reach for when justifying the premium they pay. And for a long time it wasn't just marketing — I've written before about where Apple's privacy promises actually hold up and where they quietly don't, but even with that asterisk in place, the on-device processing for face detection, the local health data handling, the wake-word detection for Siri — that stuff was real and meaningfully different from what Google and others were doing. Gurman's report yesterday wasn't exactly a surprise. Privacy-focused users had been raising this since Apple Intelligence was announced — noting that "on-device AI" and "cloud AI" were being bundled together in the same breath with very little daylight between them. The Google deal in January set off another round. By February, Google's own executives…