this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025

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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] 2 points 2 days ago

Duck.ai

[–] [email protected] 119 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Locally run AI: 0

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago (7 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] 22 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 (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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days 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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days 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.

[–] [email protected] 10 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] 8 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] 86 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] 28 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).

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Gemini: "Other Data"

Like, what's fucking left!?

[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 days ago (6 children)

DeepSeek at home: None

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days ago (5 children)

Who TF using Grok.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago

Fascists. Why?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days 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). 😳

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days 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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[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago (1 children)

And what about goddamn Mistral?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days 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)

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

not sure about swiss, they shady as hell if you have scepticism towards rich people greed

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I’m only referring to data privacy laws.

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[–] [email protected] 19 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] 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

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

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

Actual malware probably collects less data than Gemini at this point, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 days 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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days 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.

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

Use a third party API. Pay with monero.

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

Yes it is possible to create disposable-isque api keys for different uses. The monetary cost is the cost of privacy and of not having hardware to run things locally.

If you have reliable privacy friendly api vendor suggestions then do share. While I do not need such services now, it can a good future reference.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I think I only used chatgpt once to play around, and it was one of those. I dont remember the name, sorry

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

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

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