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Comment by jrk | Hacker News Reader

I think you may have triggered some concern or misunderstanding. What do you mean by "pretend it's private"?

I mean that as an app developer, I wish I could run models as powerful as ChatGPT on consumer hardware. Unfortunately, at the moment it's not possible, despite all the great progress and projects like llama.cpp. However, I see that this tech would become viable very soon. So, as a developer focusing on consumer apps, but concerned about my own and my users privacy, I decide that it's worth it to use Open AI. For now, for the sake of exploring possible new user experiences and interactions. The moment local tech is viable, I would be the first to opt out of sending my data to Open AI and use LLMs locally. Until then, we pretend that one day it's gonna be fully private and local and explore UX/UI with Open AI at the backend. Best I could do at the moment is to respect user privacy myself, and this app backend is designed to only handle your queries for a short time in-memory, never logging or recording user queries, only passing it to Open AI for streaming responses and measuring usage for billing.

To be frank, this makes the website extremely deceptive. That isn't "Private by design" - it's the opposite. You choose to prioritize the better AI assistant _over_ privacy.

The claim that "Your data is never recorded" may even be legally fraudulent. I'm glad that you don't record the data, but OpenAI does - making the claim as written a lie.

I understand why you made these decisions, but the website should not contain borderline false advertising.

You're right, the website should contain a more explicit note that user data is subject to OpenAI data retention policies. (However, I do mention that "Your data is never recorded, and opted out of future model training according with OpenAI API policies"). OpenAI did change their policies recently, and opted out any API data from future model training and promised us they delete it within 30 days. I wouldn't call it false advertising, but note taken, users must be explicitly told that their data is sent to OpenAI.

Anything you send out over the internet is by definition not private.

The only way to guarantee something is private is if it never leaves your computer.

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