this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Because these are often sold with profile building features, for example, recall. Recall is sold as "local only" with profile building features. So it continues to be centralized pii that is a point of failure. As the quote says, as i said.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Even with Recall, a hypothetical non-local equivalent would be significantly worse. Whether Microsoft actually has your data or not obviously matters. Most conceivable software that uses local AI wouldn't need any kind of profile building anyway, for instance that Firefox translation feature.

The thing that's frustrating to me here is the lack of acknowledgement that the main privacy problem with AI services is sending all queries to some company's server where they can do whatever they want with them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

why do you care that someone didnt say it was worse enough? "x is a problem, if y is true then z is a problem" -> "why didnt you talk about x"

silly.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

What's basically being said is, making an AI powered software local-only doesn't make a difference and doesn't matter. But that's not true, and the arguments for that don't seem coherent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

the point is that making it local-only is not significantly better. it does not solve a major problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

So you don't think collection of user data is a meaningful privacy problem here? How does that work?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

it is, and that is still happening.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Software that is designed not to send your data over the internet doesn't collect your data. That's what local-only means. If it does send your data over the internet, then it isn't local-only. How is it still happening?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

it does. it locally aggregates, collects data about what you do on your computer across the days and weeks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

But the company hasn't collected it, because it doesn't have it. Your computer has it. So long as it stays on your computer, it cannot harm your privacy. That's why there is such a big difference here; an actual massive loss of privacy that is guaranteed to be combined with everyone else's data and used against you, vs a potential risk of loss of privacy from someone gaining unauthorized access to your computer.