News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by jrmg on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:20AM (#40087159)
Being DDG, with its reputation, I’m sure these chats really are never saved - but the wording in the sidebar:

never saved by us, and not used to train AI models

could make the more paranoid believe that they could be saved by DDG’s partners - from very directly (Anthropic saves chats with Claude) to indirectly (all channeled through a shady arms-length subsidiary).

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by yegg on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:32AM (#40087300)
See https://duckduckgo.com/aichat/privacy-terms

"We do not save or store your Prompts or Outputs.

Additionally, all metadata that contains personal information (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers (for example, OpenAI, Anthropic).

If you submit personal information in your Prompts, it may be reproduced in the Outputs, but no one can tell whether it was you personally submitting the Prompts or someone else.

We have agreements with model providers to further protect your privacy.

As noted above, we call model providers on your behalf so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them. In addition, we have agreements in place with all model providers that further limit how they can use data from these anonymous requests that includes not using Prompts and Outputs to develop or improve their models as well as deleting all information received within 30 days."

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by lancesells on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:21AM (#40087951)
> (for example, your IP address) is obfuscated from underlying model providers

> so your personal information (for example, IP address) is not exposed to them

Is this not two different things? The first one saying that the IP address is changed in some way to make it unidentifiable. The second one is saying it's just not sent.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by yegg on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:24AM (#40087997)
No part of the IP address is sent.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by malfist on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:11AM (#40087802)
This is a "strangely specific denial"

Metadata that contains PII is not shared.

No mention of just data with PII, i.e. your chats.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by Centigonal on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:23AM (#40087973)
They proxy the metadata (e.g. IP addresses) through their own servers. They can't launder the content of the chats.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by bevekspldnw on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:40AM (#40087413)
That’s a pretty disingenuous framing. Obviously the content of the communication- what you ask the chatbot - can totally be personally identifiable, and is stored.

You aren’t providing communications content privacy, you’re providing a meta data proxy which is not remotely the same.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by seplox on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:20AM (#40087947)
Or in other words:

If you submit personal information in your Prompts, it may be reproduced in the Outputs, but no one can tell whether it was you personally submitting the Prompts or someone else.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by bevekspldnw on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:55AM (#40088392)
This was the same premise when AOL released an “anonymized” set of search data and it was easy to find the original people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by lxgr on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:56AM (#40087625)
True, but it's also the best possible thing until they can run an LLM in your browser (or maybe we figure out how to do homomorphic encryption of neural networks).

What else should they call it? I suppose "anonymous" could work (i.e. they only know about you what you tell them).

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by bevekspldnw on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:04AM (#40087729)
They could literally run Mixtral or Llama on their own machines and have total control. This is basically a ChatGPT VPN.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by lxgr on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:15AM (#40087858)
What would make their machines more trustworthy than OpenAI's or Anthropic's?
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by dumbfounder on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:29AM (#40088054)
Them saying they will not use our data or allow 3rd parties to use our data. This effort is weak sauce.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by bevekspldnw on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:49AM (#40088312)
Correct, that would be full communications content protection. This is not that, this is a pretty half assed product with a misleading set of promises.

Either use one of the many open models that beat GPT-3.5 and you have a real, and better!, product.

I literally have no idea what the point of this is, or why not make the actual step of rolling out a real private LLM. It’s literally inferior to what Mixtral provides right now, under Apache license.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by MitPitt on Friday April 19, 2024 @10:35AM (#40087351)
DDG has terrible reputation, what are you talking about. From sharing user data with Microsoft, to hiding websites in search due to political bias
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by stufffer on Friday April 19, 2024 @12:05PM (#40088509)
DDG never pretended to be unbiased. They have all the same policy decisions around artificial boosting/throttling as google without the tracking.

In their golden era search engines were essentially super sophisticated keyword matching. Users used to find novel websites from passionate people. Now it's becoming more of a social media feed of the same 100 website where you train it what you like.

This is exactly why search is so vulnerable to disruption from LLMs.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by HeatrayEnjoyer on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:55AM (#40088397)
>From sharing user data with Microsoft

Citation? I can't find this.

>to hiding websites in search due to political bias

This is a gross mischaracterization. Every search engine down weights domains and pages with bad or inaccurate information. Their entire purpose is to find good information, not penis enlargement 4 u .ru pages.

Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by troyvit on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:30AM (#40088082)
You're getting downvoted pretty heavily. Do you have sources for that? I did a quick search on Kagi and couldn't find anything to support what you say.
Re:DuckDuckGo AI Chat by pingohits on Friday April 19, 2024 @11:56AM (#40088408)
For "sharing data with microsoft": https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/24/ddg-microsoft-tracking-blo...

For "hiding websites in search", they may be referring to DDG downranking russian propaganda sites during the russian-ukraine war: https://www.pcmag.com/news/duckduckgo-to-down-rank-sites-ass...