Methods, systems, and apparatus, for handling applications in an ambient computing system with a privacy processor. One of the methods includes to remain in a monitoring power state until a controller receives an interrupt indicating that one or more sensor signals are present. The one or more sensor signals are provided as input to a machine learning engine. An inference pass is performed by the machine learning engine to generate an output representing a particular context that is specific to a particular user. It is determined that one or more components of an ambient computing system should be disabled based on the on the particular context for the particular user. In response, the one or more components of the ambient computing system are disabled.