Should I be worried about this development?
So far, I’ve tried Stract and 4get, and I’m not impressed with how limited they are - they’re not accurate, and no image and video search is what turns me away from them.
Metasearch engines like SearXNG aren’t that impressive, their results have too many filler results. My experience with manually tweaking their search also did not go well. Any alternatives with good defaults?
AI doesn’t automatically equal not private. Its probably still has private as it was before.
Now if it starts showing it knows things about you, then I’ll be concerned.
It may not be that simple though.
Chatgpt is licensing their product to lots of entities and then the licensees relabel the AI as their own with a line somewhere that says “powered by Chatgpt” or similar.
For example, Bing AI is just chatgpt-4.
So if DDG is simply licensing out chatgpt, id definitely have eprivacy concerns.
Article about DuckAssist. It is powered by an OpenAI product. It doesn’t do enough to bother me, and I can easily ignore it.
If you click the Chat button on a DDG search page, it says:
DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a private AI-powered chat service that currently supports OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and Anthropic’s Claude chat models.
So at minimum they are sharing data with one additional third party, either OpenAI or Anthropic depending on which model you choose.
OpenAI and Anthropic have similar terms and conditions for enterprise customers. They are not completely transparent and any given enterprise could have their own custom license terms, but my understanding is that they generally will not store queries or use them for training purposes. You’d better seek clarification from DDG. I was not able to find information on this in DDG’s privacy policy.
Obviously, this is not legal advice, and I do not speak for any of these companies. This is just my understanding based on the last time I looked over the OpenAI and Anthropic privacy policies, which was a few months ago.
A slightly more verbose policy specifically for the AI stuff is at https://duckduckgo.com/aichat/privacy-terms
Thanks! I didn’t see that. Relevant bit for convenience:
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.
Pretty standard stuff for such services in my experience.
DuckDuckGo’s AI is basically a proxy to OpenAI or Anthropic.
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.
If you don’t like the sound of that anyway, and it’s totally understandable if so, there are settings to disable it.
I use Andisearch, it’s AI, summarizing and explaining better than Perplexity and apart one of the most private search engine out there (active protection), anonymous use, no logs, no ads, no cookies, own reader mode of websites, embedded and sandboxed YT videos in the search result.
- For video search, does search on individual instances like for example https://piped.video and https://yewtu.be not give you good results ?
Both yes and no. Usually, when I try to gather information, I prefer if there’s the option to access texts and videos at the same time. I did not realize how important it was, after I tried using Stract for almost two weeks. It is a minute inconvenience, and also that I don’t want to be restricted to a single platform.
It will not share data about you until you specifically use the chat function. It’s on a different tab, like the image tab and the video tab.
And when you use it, it works as a privacy proxy, like piped and invidious does with youtube, or libreddit with reddit
I would not call that a “privacy proxy”, it is very disingenuous. It is a normal proxy, which replaces the technical metadata from your connection, so that automated tracking is harder. But it will not replace or remove any of your input. And you can easily be tracked that way too.
