DuckDuckGo now has an AI prompt available in beta, and I can already see it on my devices. Does it affect privacy? If so, what alternatives do we have?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.