DDG is now offering free/private AI chat using several models.

  • kinsnik@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    If they are using GPT-3.5 and Claude, that means that they are sending the chats to Open AI and Anthropic, right? How can they assure that the chats are private and not being used in training if they don’t control what other companies do?

    Edit: ok, they claim to have agreements with them to delete chats within 30 days and they hide the user IP

    • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      DDG’s classic “Trust me bro” privacy policy.

      I don’t dislike DDG and I do use it, but goddamn I’d love to see a public audit of their privacy claims. DDG is closed source and they’ve only ever given Their Word TM about their claims. The privacy community puts a lot of faith in DDG despite not being able to test anything it says.

    • TAG@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      That is how DDG search works as well. They take your search query and send it to a regular, data harvesting search engine. The engine does not see your IP address and cannot track you with a cookie but they can monitor the search queries of DDG users in aggregate.

      • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Ddg doesnt work for search anymore, completely compromised giving the same results as google and others, exact same bubble you are in. I dont want personalisation

        • lud@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          It works very well for me still. I haven’t noticed anything weird.

          • Squizzy@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Hooefully it stays like that for you. For me I use it on all devices but they are all independent. If I search a random name it will find doctors etc. close to me with that name, down to my town. If I turn off location I will get a few general results and then back to localised.

            It is incredibly annoying, especially when doing research as I cannot get out of the localised loop. Recently I needed a legislative policy from France but could not remember the name of the policy so I searched for the intention of the policy and got local results by local papers and local politicians discussing similar legislation. I could not get to the French results without using a VPN and I got very different results then.

            There is also the concern then that ddg are sending my IP with the query. So I get bad results and no privacy.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    7 months ago

    The good: usability. Bot answers are easy to access but still very distinct from the actual websearch. And if you don’t like bot shit, it’s easy to ignore. (I found some use case for it, but I get that plenty people dislike this.)

    The bad: as others mentioned, even if you trust DDG, you have no reason to trust Microsoft’s vassal OpenAI and its warring feud equally infested by tech bros Anthropic.

    The ugly: the financial motivations behind the move are unclear. What is DDG trying to get from that? What is its business strategy?

  • nytrixus@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This is very surreal right now with what we’re dealing with.

    Firefox is leaning towards AI but promised for years and years about how private it is and how they won’t do anything to your data.

    DDG promised the same thing and was seen as the Anti-Google/Bing for a long time, now it’s dealing with AI and our data is now on the table again.

    Why, guys?