this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
188 points (96.1% liked)

Privacy

36809 readers
692 users here now

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

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
k_o_t@lemmy.ml
tmpod@lemmy.pt
Yayannick@lemmy.ml
ranok@sopuli.xyz
188
What Kinds of Data do AI Chatbots Collect? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) by will_a113@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
40 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A chart titled "What Kind of Data Do AI Chatbots Collect?" lists and compares seven AI chatbots—Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, Deepseek, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok—based on the types and number of data points they collect as of February 2025. The categories of data include: Contact Info, Location, Contacts, User Content, History, Identifiers, Diagnostics, Usage Data, Purchases, Other Data.

  • Gemini: Collects all 10 data types; highest total at 22 data points
  • Claude: Collects 7 types; 13 data points
  • CoPilot: Collects 7 types; 12 data points
  • Deepseek: Collects 6 types; 11 data points
  • ChatGPT: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
  • Perplexity: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
  • Grok: Collects 4 types; 7 data points
all 41 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] demunted@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 hour ago

Who TF using Grok.

[–] knighthawk0811@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 hours ago

I'm interested in seeing how this changes when using duck duck go front end at duck.ai

there's no login and history is stored locally (probably remotely too)

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 27 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

DeepSeek at home: None

[–] tonyn@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 hours ago

How much VRAM does your machine have? Are you using open webui?

[–] twice_hatch@midwest.social -2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Doesn't the official local app still have telemetry? I might be remembering wrong

[–] Goretantath@lemm.ee 5 points 4 hours ago

You just use the model in an opensource program, not theirs.

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

And what about goddamn Mistral?

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Its French as far as I know so at least it abides to gdpr by default.

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 hour ago

All services you see above are provided to EU citizens, which is why they also have to abide by GDPR. GDPR does not disallow the gathering of information. Google, for example, is GDPR compliant, yet they are number 1 on that list. That’s why I would like to know if European companies still try to have a business case with personal data or not.

[–] Cris16228@lemmy.today 59 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Me when Gemini (aka google) collects more data than anyone else:

Not really shocked, we all know that google sucks

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 15 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I would hazard a guess that the only reason those others aren't as high is because they don't have the same access to data. It's not that they don't want to, they simply can't (yet).

[–] Cris16228@lemmy.today 2 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Which is good (for now). Glad I don't use that shit

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 80 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Locally run AI: 0

[–] exothermic@lemmy.world 11 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

Are there tutorials on how to do this? Should it be set up on a server on my local network??? How hard is it to set up? I have so many questions.

[–] Kiuyn@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I recommend GPT4all if you want run locally on your PC. It is super easy.

If you want to run in a separate server. Ollama + some kind of web UI is the best.

Ollama can also be run locally but IMO it take more learning than GUI app like GPT4all.

[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

If by more learning you mean learning

ollama run deepseek-r1:7b

Then yeah, it's a pretty steep curve!

If you're a developer then you can also search "$MyFavDevEnv use local ai ollama" to find guides on setting up. I'm using Continue extension for VS Codium (or Code) but there's easy to use modules for Vim and Emacs and probably everything else as well.

The main problem is leveling your expectations. The full Deepseek is a 671b (that's billions of parameters) and the model weights (the thing you download when you pull an AI) are 404GB in size. You need so much RAM available to run one of those.

They make distilled models though, which are much smaller but still useful. The 14b is 9GB and runs fine with only 16GB of ram. They obviously aren't as impressive as the cloud hosted big versions though.

[–] Kiuyn@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

My assumption is always the person I am talking to is a normal window user who don't know what a terminal is. Most of them even freak out when they see "the black box with text on it". I guess on Lemmy the situation is better. It is just my bad habit.

[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 54 minutes ago

No worries! You're probably right that it's better not to assume, and it's good of you to provide some different options.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 9 points 6 hours ago

Check out Ollama, it’s probably the easiest way to get started these days. It provides tooling and an api that different chat frontends can connect to.

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

I used this a while back, it was pretty straightforward https://github.com/nathanlesage/local-chat

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

If you want to start playing around immediately, try Alpaca if Linux, LMStudio if Windows. See if it works for you, then move from there.

Alpaca actually runs its own Ollama instance.

[–] nimpnin@sopuli.xyz 1 points 5 hours ago

I used this a while back, it was pretty straightforward https://github.com/nathanlesage/local-chat

[–] TuxEnthusiast@sopuli.xyz 10 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Only if my hardware could support it..

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 5 hours ago

I can actually use locally some smaller models on my 2017 laptop (though I have increased the RAM to 16 GB).

You'd be surprised how mich can be done with how little.

[–] WreckingBANG@lemmy.ml 38 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Who would have guessed that the advertising company collects a lot of data

[–] will_a113@lemmy.ml 20 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

And I can't possibly imagine that Grok actually collects less than ChatGPT.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 22 points 9 hours ago

Data from surfshark aka nordvpn lol. Take it with a few chunks of salt

[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 23 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Back in the day, malware makers could only dream of collecting as much data as Gemini does.

[–] abdominable@lemm.ee 14 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I have a bridge to sell you if you think grok is collecting the least amount of info.

[–] Goretantath@lemm.ee 1 points 4 hours ago

Ikr XD

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Is there away to fake all the data they try to collect?

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (2 children)

Pretty sure this is what they scrape from your device if you install their app. I dont know how else they would get access to contacts and location and stuff. So yeah you can just run it on a virtual android device and feed it garbage data, but i assume the app or their backend will detect that and throw out your data.

[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 5 hours ago

How about if I only use the web version?

[–] nieminen@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

Root, install xprivacy (or xprivacylua if your phone isn't 10 years old).

[–] OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml 7 points 9 hours ago

Or you could use Deepseek's workaround and run it locally. You know, open source and all.

[–] KingDingbat@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Just clarifying, does this report mean it's collected while a user is using the tools, or data that is generally scraped from the internet?

[–] will_a113@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

They're talking about what is being recorded while the user is using the tools (your prompts, RAG data, etc.)

[–] quantum_faun@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Does that include generated responses?

[–] will_a113@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 hours ago

Nobody knows! There's no specific disclosure that I'm aware of (in the US at least), and even if there was I wouldn't trust any of these guys to tell the truth about it anyway.

As always, don't do anything on the Internet that you wouldn't want the rest of the world to find out about :)

[–] krolden@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

Aren't they supposed to collect data?