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Comment by 3s | Hacker News Reader

Are people concerned about the privacy implications of computer use at all? This is why I haven’t been using Claude computer use personally. Somehow the idea of sending everything I do on my computer to a random third party seems creepy. There are a lot of applications of AI (rewind comes to mind) that I simply cannot accept the idea of sharing my screen with

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I share this feeling every time a popup asks me to accept coookies for a website and its 1243 "trusted partners" — which, in this context, feels like a Ghengis Khan scale harem rather than any sane business relationship.

That is why open source and local hostable models are so important. The privacy considerations are what are paramount, not just the ability to have unlimited token generation.

We have more than a quarter of a century of the normalization of zero privacy, and this is obviously anti Chinese AI company propaganda because the reality is that RTB is so bad that the security concerns are simply not new so why should people to even care?

Google, Meta, Microsoft and other RTB firms send RTB data about people in the U.S. to Russia and China and anyone else who signs up...many people don't see the difference. In fact for many people, the CCP having your data is far less of a risk vector than the thousands of others who get your data every single time you hit a webpage, visit the local store etc...

When Google, Meta, Microsoft etc... are selling your data thousands of times a day, and companies aggregate that to sell even sensitive information completely based on even national security sensitive categories.

https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Americas-hidd...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/online-behavioral-ads-...

* you can always choose to self a small model, although it probably doesn't work as well

* it's not a "random third party". You know to whom the data is being sent, and at least according to service agreements, most services don't use your data for training. If you don't trust Claude, you could trust AWS hosted version, or GPT/Deepseek hosted on Azure. Well, if you think Amazon/Microsoft is not trustworthy and they may misuse your data in these cloud services (not some random consumer facing service where you are the product), you might as well give up your digital life.

> most services don't use your data for training

This is a claim that really irks me (when companies make it). It’s a non-denial denial. “We don’t train on user data” is NOT the same as:

- We don’t retain user data

- We don’t share user data with business partners

- We don’t mine user data for business ideas or ways to compete with our users’ products

- Etc.

This. I'm surprised that even a lot of smart and tech savvy folks are not able to see these pitfalls.

You can run AIs locally. I have a laptop that can DeepSeek's thinking <= 70b versions of qwen and llama locally, and they are a blast to play with even on an airplane without an internet connection.

It does not appear that this aims to use an API, but rather to train/finetune their own model using insights from R1 ([mostly] pure RL approach towards bootstrapping reasoning in an LLM)

Outside of tech circles? No, not really. The past decade is showed that if anything goes out of the window first, it'll be privacy if it helps in terms of speed, convenience or money.

I’m concerned. Not just privacy but AI request forgery will also be a thing.

Running local models don’t protect you from prompt injection attacks or hallucinations.

There are some startups building capabilities apis to limit that but most websites/apps either don’t have the resources or aren’t willing to expose those capabilities.

And as some others have mentioned, users have a track record of giving up privacy for convenience. I’m not convinced educating non-technical users about the risks involved will ward them off.

> There are some startups building capabilities apis to limit that but most websites/apps either don’t have the resources or aren’t willing to expose those capabilities.

Care to elaborate with example(s) of a startups doing this?

Agree! Its a bridge too far for me as well, we hope to offer the ecosystem private alternatives.

I was thinking it would just use a local copy through LM Studio or Ollama. Wouldn’t that work?

yeah i have no interest in having an AI control anything on my computer, i would just make a script for that

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