Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
guy using chat gpt to ask about anime waifus and the bot confused if he's 12 or 45.
This will last right up until all the right-wingers get pissed they're being identified as teenagers based on their 5th grade writing level.
i hate living in the crypto , ai and big social media era
It's only getting worse too. The entire US economy is being propped up by AI and crypto. It's like the sub-prime mortgage craze of the early 2000s. Lots of money going into a system that will never recoup the investment. Either they have to find a way to extract value, or the bottom's gonna fall out. Just wait for the too big to fail AI and tech bailouts.
So by worse you mean better? I can't wait for the AI bubble to pop personally.
Did you skip the last sentence?
The whole idea of software services where the output is not a function of the input, but rather a function of the input plus all the data the service has been able to harvest about you has always been awful. It was awful when google started doing it years ago and it's awful when LLM frontends do it now. You should be able to know that what you are seeing is what others would see, and have some assurance that you aren't being manipulated on a personal level.
It's shocking how much this 'personalized' stuff is normalized.
Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.
I just run everything possible locally which helps a lot. Nearly everything my friends do in "the cloud" I do on my own computer. Even stuff like spreadsheets they want to do in the cloud. It flummoxes me, how willing they are to share everything with big tech.
If you have a mid range or better GPU, you can even run a local LLM. I have used one for language translation. I cannot speak German but I was talking to a German speaker who did not speak English about a hobby. We could talk to each other despite not sharing a language. That's practically sci-fi to me! I used a sandboxed LLM disallowed from any network access, to do that.
Even so, I am skeptical about most of what I see people use LLMs for. I am afraid of what they will allow bad actors to do. I am afraid of even worse corruption of the information space. I doubt the horse will re-enter the barn tho.
Good, maybe people will stop using it and switch to an open-weight Chinese model
If you use the app it's still sending all of your data to the company that makes the model, I guess it depends if you prefer Chinese spyware or US spyware.
Step 1 - don't use apps on a phone and instead use an appropriate open source sandbox on an actual x86 machine.
The mobile-focused development cycle and its consequences have been a disaster for user agency.
The mobile-focused development cycle and its consequences have been a disaster for user agency.
Could you repeat that louder for the folks at the back?
(Also, it's a statement that's generally true in ways completely unreleated to AI.)
At least they use your data to make a model that's open weight
Just don't use AI and you'll be fine
If at all possible, anyone that cares about their privacy should be self hosting.
So corporations will decide whether you should be forced to surrender commercially valuable personal data to them, that makes them more money. Great system guys! If we can't trust mega corporations with political connections, who can we trust?
Try any model with LMStudio and with the DuckDuckgo search plugin to it. It works better than you might think.
So if I talk about hemorrhoids enough, it will think I'm old and let me into the pr0n sites! Cool!!!
You would be surprised what health problems people under 18 can have.
At some point in the 2000s I chatted with the SmarterChild chatbot on MSN Messenger for a while. I was around 11 or 12 years old at the time.
I remember it once answering "sorry, web search is only available to adult users", to which I responded "how do you know I'm just a child?". I don't remember what came before or after that… it might have asked me my DOB at some point before that, but am until today not sure how it knew that. Point is, none of this is new… 😁
how do you know I'm just a child?"
"You just told me, kiddo!"
If you absolutely must use ChatGPT, you can do it with Duck.ai as a proxy to protect your personal info.
the amount of problems i don't have to deal with because i simply don't use GenAI
Finally I see a use for AI. In a carnival midway. "I will guess your age for $250".
Makes sense to me. Use the LLM itself to counter children from using it in ways they aren't allowed to.
Mhhhh another FairMail user, a person of culture. I only used it because it was the only OSS client with encryption and signature support
Ha, I thought this was an email from FairEmail at first. That would have been wild. This coming from Scam Altman, not surprising 🤷♀️