ChatGPT is proprietary and run directly by OpenAI/Microsoft, you should have no expectations of any Privacy whatsoever. Same for Perplexity unless you use one of their open-source models trough a privacy-respecting third-party.
Furthemore, nowadays the gap has closed. Models like Qwen3 are very powerful.
Yep the sole reason I brought up AI chat section is to say that if running locally + open source + cross platform is not good enough for recommendation, then a lot more tools currently being recommended by PG should also be removed.
I would also add that I would be happy to add tools like GIMP and Inkscape as alternatives to commonly used alternatives like Photoshop/Illustrator. These seem like very reasonable additions, seeing as Creative Cloud is (literal) spyware and Adobe has a horrendous security record.
I think the only reason we haven’t recommended these is that nobody has asked us to, so they are extremely low priority, not because they are “out of scope” for the site, so this isn’t a great argument against recommending office suites.
Kinda crazy to think that we’ve gotten to the point where “offline and local” is now the exception rather than the norm. At this point, any software that doesn’t spy on you is a privacy tool.
I think you mean “Privacy Friendly Software”? They don’t improve your privacy directly, but they don’t automatically lower your privacy when you use them.
I mean, yes, but this has always been the case. This is why we consider things like Akregator or Thunderbird to be privacy tools. They don’t necessarily have to actively defend you from external threats — unless that is their entire job like a password manager or VPN obviously — they simply have to not be a threat themselves. The entire point of all this is to highlight software that’s privacy friendly
How often do you ask political questions to chatbots anyway?
Yes, the models are censored but so is Western models, just differently. Western models will get offended for baseless reasons and will refuse to discuss many topics.
In any case, you can run abliterated models that have censorship removed.
But this (with no opt-out telemetry) is enough IMO
I think the trickiest part of this here is what TinFoilHat mentioned above, as well as a ton of my own experience both on this site and elsewhere. I think it’s really important to distinguish between improving privacy and going nuclear on stuff. I personally cannot replace Photoshop with Gimp, because if I did, I would lose my job. Same with replacing Maya with Blender, Windows with Linux, my iPhone with Graphene OS.
To clarify, as I realized I forgot this, I have actually had people tell me that if I can’t switch to Gimp, then I SHOULD quit my job.
The problem with offering every last open source alternative is that it hyper polarizes the privacy community into thinking that there’s no middle ground, when an effort needs to be made to have things work for everybody. I was able to get my relatives to start using Brave browser. But there’s no way they’re going to have “forget me when I close this site enabled.” But if they ever meet somebody from this community, they’d tell them they’re failing anyways since they’re on Windows.
The middle ground cannot be forgotten here, and while the community likes to throw around “build your own threat model,” that does not line up with the aggression that this community often puts forwards when trying to do things like harden a Samsung phone, a Windows PC, etc.
You could use PS for work and still use GIMP should you have the need to edit photos in your freetime. I always see recommendations to switch from X to Y as something I might do on my personal devices, but not something I should propose to my boss. At work I have to use Windows (with telemetry enabled, despite being Win11 Enterprise) and Chrome with a work provided account and I couldn’t care less, since it’s not my private data thats being exposed and workplace doesn’t seem to care.
For things that don’t work in a seperate profile on GOS I requested a work device, which is mandatory here, if my boss wants me to use a phone for work.
I guess this is a mix of few loud “bad actors” who only regard a fully foss system as private and secure and people not fully understanding the implications something has regarding security and privacy. For example if someone asks how they can achieve “maximum privacy and security” and then says they have a Samsung Galaxy imo it’s reasonable to tell them that a pixel with Graphene would be better for what they want to achieve, but if someone wants to know how to increase their privacy on a Samsung Galaxy that advice is not helpful.
I think we do a pretty good job at ‘strongly discouraging’ those “bad actors” you mention, and they’ve largely found other communities to set up shop in.
Although… the other thing which often occurs is people will come here saying “I’m doing X to increase my privacy on my Samsung phone” and X is something that would actually harm their privacy or security. Like people granting root access to all the apps on their phone or gutting system components with ADB.
When people just ask “what can I do to increase my privacy on my Samsung phone?” (or, “is X a good idea?” and we can simply reply “no”), I think there is usually far less issue.
I think something that helps with this is a sort of “walkthrough” for different devices and softwares. Between the guides on TheNewOil, the Techlore “Go Incognito” stuff (levels 1, 2, and 3), and all of the recommendations and threat modeling info on this site, I sort of know exactly what I need to do for every single device and piece of software as I set them up. If I get a new phone, I have a checklist that I custom tailored to my own needs that I can spend an hour or two going through, and I’m mostly ready to go after that.
It would be interesting if there was some sort of wizard, AI tool, whatever it is that could generate that for everybody while also making them aware of the drawbacks of the settings as well. But experimentation is the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t some of the time. My wife went through the Android walkthrough on TheNewOil and was confused when her At A Glance completely broke. Eventually, she found the setting, determined it wasn’t worth it for her, and re-enabled it.
That’s how learning happens, but with so few people willing to learn, it’s hard to encourage them to even try.
I get what you mean, but we also must be clear that a Windows PC and a Samsung PC can’t be private. I don’t think there is a middle ground, we recommend good privacy tools, most of them accessible to the average person. If for some reason, one doesn’t want to use some of them, then it’s ok but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recommend it.
We could change it to optional, as Brave has great tracking protection so first-party tracking isn’t as much of a concern.
Samsung PC can surely be private, you just need to install a clean OS. A pretty good level of privacy can also be achieved by hardening & debloating Windows, using firewall and with DNS blockers.
Linux is not for everyone (at least not for my PC due to driver issues). More so, the learning curve of Linux is so steep that 95% of computer users won’t have time, energy and interest to learn all that.
There are very few “always go for” options we can actually recommend. In this case, there is simply no privacy friendly options could provide on-par functionalities and still fully compatible with MS Office. If the user relies on MS Office, we shall, to an extent, quite confident that what we recommend could meet user’s needs, and warm them for any potential hurdles.
A blanket statement of “there is no point asking for privacy improvements if you use Windows + MS Office” is simply not helping and in fact quite discouraging.
That’s true, you can reduce the privacy invasion but it wouldn’t be private by any mean. Windows has control over the software, and I don’t think you can stop all data collection. For example, even with a firewall will it kick out on boot or after login ?
Same for the DNS blocker. (Unless you use Rasbery-Pi blocker but in that case it’s out-of-scope of just Windows)
