How to use OpenAI anonymously and in isolation, protecting our data?

Hi,
Well aware about how AI is invading our data and privacy, but still in need of using it for some tasks, I thought about what solutions could be effective in making OpenAI work, without revealing to it too much of our identity/personal data.

The first idea came with multiple steps:
First step was not to use it on a smartphone, but on a desktop, as the smarthphone knows too much about us already and to make the second step works.
Second to use effective compartmentalization using isolation, by means of Virtual Machines.
Third was to make the virtual machines running a trustworthy VPN provider.
Fourth to use a secure browser that beats fingerprinting, but without TOR.
and finally, to Signup using a disposable Email adress provider.

The last step was very tricky as OpenAI rejected few email providers, telling me I can not use this Email adress to signup,
but eventually it worked, only with many issues:
I had to login and relogin to do their verification puzzle five times before i was finally able make it work.

After all these efforts, I realized that in order to get a response from ChatGPT, I had to set the security level of my browser to Standard, as the “safer” option that disables website features that are often dangerous, causing some sites to lose functionality, makes ChatGPT to never answer me back, it just keeps loading and loading and nothing happens.

Overall, it worked and I made it!
It was not easy to set all this up, but I ended having my first conversation with the technology, and each time i restart my browser, I am getting another fingerprint detected according to Bromite’s fingerprint mitigation tool , so no permanence here.

This was a first successful idea setup and it worked.
Now how about many more ideas?

Do you have any more to share?

This is great.

OpenAI seems very strict on collecting data. I tried just signing up on their forum, and experienced similar behavior. It doesnt allow you to sign up using a VPN or a simplealias email. So I had to use a mobile IP and a throwaway gmail account. Then I just changed the email address afterwards, which seems to have worked. :crossed_fingers:

I don’t have much to contribute. But please keep us updated on your progress. I’m particularly curious of whether using OpenAI privately is possible.

Does OpenAI not require phone numbers anymore to register? I ran into that previously when signing up.

but on a desktop, as the smarthphone knows too much about us already

I’d argue that’s not related to smartphones vs. desktops, but more on what operating system and apps/services you use, among a lot of other factors. I don’t think generalizations like this are useful.

Third was to make the virtual machines running a trustworthy VPN provider.

I agree with running a VPN, but having a virtual machine just for this seems far too overkill. If OpenAI was running as a program, then maybe a VM would make sense, but it’s just a website in a browser… It’s already very limited on what it can access.

Overall, my recommendation would be to just avoid OpenAI, and use better privacy-respecting alternatives instead, like Brave Leo. But if you have to use it, I’d say using it in a privacy-respecting browser, with a good VPN, good content blocker, and an email alias and unique password, is enough. There’s also Perplexity, which isn’t really privacy respecting either, but it doesn’t require an account, so that’d probably be a better option than just using OpenAI directly if you couldn’t get away with using a privacy respecting AI instead.

If ChatGPT is enough, then you can use it without an account in some countries.

According to more credible tech youtube channels, Meta’s OLlama can be surprisingly made private… if you have a GPU with a 20+GB RAM…

Have you considered trying https://jan.ai/? You can run it locally completely offline and download different AI models.

I’ve seen it mentioned here on the forum and I gave it a go, it works pretty well. However, keep in mind that it can be quite resource demanding in some cases.
Hope it helps!

@Muon Please check this discussion about adding an AI tool category AI Tool - #29 by Encounter5729

Tldr is Brave Leo, DuckDuckGo Chat are great online providers, but we need more info on offline apps

Ive used llama3 from meta using olama and open webui and it can run on a laptop. The laptop has an average graphic card but do have a lot of ram. This allows me to use the tool privately as it is running on my comouter.

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