this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025

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Privacy

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406

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

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days 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)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

How about if I only use the web version?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And what about goddamn Mistral?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago (7 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days 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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Does that include generated responses?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days 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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 5 days ago (2 children)

DeepSeek at home: None

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] -5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago (3 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Aren't they supposed to collect data?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 105 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

Not really shocked, we all know that google sucks

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 days 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).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago

Ikr XD

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m curious what data t3chat collects. They support all the models and I’m pretty sure they use Sentry and Stripe, but beyond that, who knows?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

Anthropic and OpenAPI both have options that let you use their API without training the system on your data (not sure if the others do as well), so if t3chat is simply using the API it may be that they themselves are collecting your inputs (or not, you'd have to check the TOS), but maybe their backend model providers are not. Or, who knows, they could all be lying too.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 140 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Locally run AI: 0

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (5 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago (4 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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 days 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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

If only my hardware could support it..

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days 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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[–] [email protected] 58 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 30 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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