Confer, Meta, Apple Launch Private AI Services as Confer Charges $34.99 for TEE Protections
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Sep 22
Confer, Meta, Apple Launch Private AI Services as Confer Charges $34.99 for TEE Protections
2 articles · Updated · WIRED · Sep 22
Summary
Confer, Meta and Apple are rolling out AI services that try to block even their own servers from reading chats, using trusted execution environments or Apple’s Private Cloud Compute rather than simple no-logging promises.
TEEs isolate prompts on protected hardware and can cryptographically prove the rest of the system cannot access them; Confer uses Nvidia confidential computing, while Meta offers a locked WhatsApp Meta AI mode and Apple verifies PCC code before server processing.
Big-model privacy still has limits: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google mainly reserve zero-data-retention terms for paid enterprise users, and even then keep abuse-monitoring exceptions or model restrictions.
Consumer alternatives such as Proton’s Lumo, Duck.ai and Venice.ai often rely on policy promises or proxying requests to ChatGPT or Claude, which can still expose identifying details embedded in prompts.
Privacy carries trade-offs: Confer’s paid tier costs $34.99 a month after roughly 20 to 25 free queries a day, while local AI keeps data on-device but is generally weaker than cloud models.