Ask HN: How do you feel about using AI tools on your phone? Privacy vs. Utility | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about using AI tools on your phone? Privacy vs. Utility

1 pointfallinditch5 comments

I make a reasonable effort to preserve privacy - on my phone I use a privacy focused browser, turn off location services when I don't need them, I opted out of the AI Personal Assistant etc, although I haven't gone as far as subscribing to a VPN.

But the some of the AI Personal Assistant type features are very useful!

AI on your phone is a privacy nightmare but I'm starting to think we've lost the privacy battle and I may as well give in and start to incorporate AI tools and agents more fully into my online activities.

Do you use the AI agents/tools on your phone? What about your privacy in the age of AI? Do you have any rules or strategies for engaging with AI on your phone or in general?

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I'm likely the exception but I just want my phone to make/receive phone calls and text messages. My phone via real time spell check is already leaking a lot of data to my wireless provider over ipsec and Google over HTTPS simultaneously even if spell check is disabled and I am not OK with that.

Blimey. I'm not ok with that either.

Someone was telling me the other day that they found their YouTube feed so distressing that they deleted their Google account and created a new one ... but YouTube kept on sending the same horrid content, presumably because of device fingerprinting. It was distressing for this person not only for the actual content that was in his feed but mainly because the YouTube algorithm had decided that this was what he wanted to watch. He showed me a clip of something from his feed and I was like "dude, I am sorry for you and worried about you, that is bad."

So that's a bit off topic but the point is that the information they hold about us is vast and powerful.

What actually sounds useful?

On a basic level it's commanding and automating actions like making bookings and purchases, managing your calendar, etc.

But then it's operating a group or 'swarm' of specialized AI agent assistants to carry out research, communication, analysis, planning, reporting, content creation, software development, etc.

So I'm not yet operating agents via my phone and the AI assistant on my phone is only going to help me by removing some friction and speeding things up a little.

How do you use AI on your phone?

I don't. None of that sounds useful to me.

I don't want a slop machine to purchase things for me. I manage my calendar just fine with a calendar app.

I don't need a swarm of agents to make up research results, I don't need AI to communicate nonsense on my behalf, analyze anything, and I damn sure don't want it to plan anything for me.

If I needed to report on something I'd use something like Excel or SQL to organize data. The internet has enough slop content, certainly don't need to generate more of that.

Absolutely don't need it to write garbage, security vulnerability laden, code for me. If I did for some reason a phone wouldn't be the right tool for that job anyway.

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