How to Use AI With Your Privacy Intact
Your conversations with AI chatbots are both highly personal and deeply vulnerable to surveillance. Here’s how you can protect yourself.
AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini have become a go-to resource for many individuals seeking advice and support. However, these services typically collect and store user data without restrictions on sharing or selling it. Privacy expert Matt Green warns that users are essentially revealing all aspects of their lives to these systems.
In the past, text messages were considered the most intimate data shared by individuals, leading Moxie Marlinspike to develop Signal, an encrypted messaging app. Now, AI interactions pose an even greater privacy risk. Marlinspike's solution is Confer, an AI chatbot that utilizes cryptography to prevent the server from accessing user conversations.
Confer is one of several emerging AI services aiming to address privacy concerns. Some promise no conversation logging, while others claim to anonymize data. A select few, like Confer, employ technical safeguards to restrict their own access to user information. Users must understand that there is no absolute privacy when using these AI platforms.
Even the strongest privacy policies, such as zero data retention (ZDR) offered by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, have exceptions and limitations. For most consumers, relying on these contractual promises is not feasible. Instead, privacy-focused AI services like Proton's Lumo offer assurances that conversations will not be logged, although users must trust the company's commitment to privacy.
Written by urgent.news from Wired's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
