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What Kinds of Data do AI Chatbots Collect? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by will_a113@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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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

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[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 143 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Locally run AI: 0

[–] exothermic@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago (8 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 26 points 10 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 10 months ago (2 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.

[–] smee@poeng.link 4 points 10 months ago

Or if using flatpak, its an add-on for Alpaca. One click install, GUI management.

Windows users? By the time you understand how to locally install AI, you're probably knowledgeable enough to migrate to linux. What the heck is the point of using local AI for privacy while running windows?

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months 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.

[–] TangledHyphae@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

https://ollama.ai/, this is what I've been using for over a year now, new models come out regularly and you just "ollama pull " and then it's available to run locally. Then you can use docker to run https://www.openwebui.com/ locally, giving it a ChatGPT-style interface (but even better and more configurable and you can run prompts against any number of models you select at once.)

All free and available to everyone.

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[–] TuxEnthusiast@sopuli.xyz 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

If only my hardware could support it..

[–] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 10 months 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.

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[–] Cris16228@lemmy.today 105 points 10 months 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 34 points 10 months ago (2 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).

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[–] WreckingBANG@lemmy.ml 59 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] will_a113@lemmy.ml 30 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 31 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 49 points 10 months ago (6 children)

DeepSeek at home: None

[–] tonyn@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago

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

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[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 28 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And what about goddamn Mistral?

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

If it's one thing I don't trust its non-EU companies following GDPR. Sure they're legally bound to, but l mean Meta doesn't care so why should the rest.

(Yes I'm being overly dramatic about this, but I've lost trust ages ago in big tech companies)

[–] zr0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Fully agree, which is also why I choose EU/Swiss made services by default

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[–] kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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

[–] abdominable@lemm.ee 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

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[–] demunted@lemmy.ml 24 points 10 months ago (5 children)

Who TF using Grok.

[–] MoonRaven@feddit.nl 13 points 10 months ago

Fascists. Why?

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[–] knighthawk0811@lemmy.ml 22 points 10 months 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)

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Note this is if you use their apps. Not the api. Not through another app.

[–] will_a113@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not that we have any real info about who collects/uses what when you use the API

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 4 points 10 months ago

Yeah we do, they list it in privacy policies. Many of these they can't really collect even if they wanted to

[–] sonalder@lemmy.ml 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Anyone has these data from Mistral, HuggingChat and MetaAI ? Would be nice to add them too

Edit : Leo from brave would be great to compare too

[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Gemini: "Other Data"

Like, what's fucking left!?

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[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Almost none of this data is possible to collect when using Tor Browser

[–] serenissi@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nope, these services almost always require user login, eventually tied to cell number (ie non disposable) and associate user content and other data points with account. Nonetheless user prompts are always collected. How they're used is a good question.

[–] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Use a third party API. Pay with monero.

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[–] krnl386@lemmy.ca 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Wow, it’s a whole new level of f*cked up when Zuck collects more data than the Winnie the Pooh (DeepSeek). 😳

[–] Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The idea that US apps are somehow better than Chinese apps when it comes to collecting and selling user data is complete utter propaganda.

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[–] OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml 9 points 10 months ago

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

[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months 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.

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[–] subatomic4771@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months ago

I just came across this article which for people who are into self hosting can take a look and participate. It's basically a tool that generating never ending web pages with non sense that load slow (but not too slow the AI tools move on) to slow down and thus cost them more to scrape the internet if enough people are doing it. You can also hide it in a way that legit user would never see this on your site:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

[–] arakhis_@feddit.org 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

anyone whos competent in the matter: what about the french competition chat.mistral.ai

[–] TangledHyphae@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

+1 for Mistral, they were the first (or one of the first) Apache open source licensed models. I run Mistral-7B and variant fine tunes locally, and they've always been really high quality overall. Mistral-Medium packed a punch (mid-size obviously) but it definitely competes with the big ones at least.

[–] scintilla@lemm.ee 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Am I missing something? What do the numbers mean in relation to the type? Sub types?

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