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?
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’d rather walk into my local library and ask my librarian for a prompt, then spend 3 hours searching an old encyclopedia for the answer, than ever resolving a domain owned by Brave. Thanks.
OK, what have they done that is worse than Microsoft(bing) (ddg)?
Short answer: inserting affiliate links into results, and weird cryptocurrency stuff. https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology
I don’t know if that’s “worse than Microsoft” because that’s a real high bar. But it’s different anyway.
OK, like I said above, I’m not using their browser. How would any of this affect me using a website?
I’m not entirely clear on which (anti-)features are only in the browser vs in the web site as well. It sounds like they are steering people toward their commercial partners like Binance across the board.
Personally I find the cryptocurrency stuff off-putting in general. Not trying to push my opinion on you though. If you don’t object to any of that stuff, then as far as I know Brave is fine for you.
I have never run into anything crypto related using their website…
nuh uh
No thanks pass
The brave browser has AI already, it’s a matter of time until their search engine does too.
Frankly I trust duckduckgo more than brave with that data.
I also do not have any better suggestions.
I’m not using the brave browser, just the website.
What is the issue with this?
How can an ai summarizer online get anything from my phone?
How’s it know what you summarize?
It summarizes the search results???
It doesn’t do it for every search. The first searches i tried were things like: “why are people on the internet so stupid” or “how to explain complex things to idiots for dummies”
Its prolly riddled with errors, but the point is that this is part of their website, so anything it uses is on their servers.
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.
Yeah, I don’t know how they could be much better. Obviously since they don’t host the model, they’re doing like SearxNG and passing along data for you, but all they can do is remind you not to mention anything personally identifying.
Edit: well it tried.
Heh.
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 redditI 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.
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 ?