A chart titled “What Kind of Data Do AI Chatbots Collect?” lists and compares seven AI chatbots—Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, Deepseek, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok—based on the types and number of data points they collect as of February 2025. The categories of data include: Contact Info, Location, Contacts, User Content, History, Identifiers, Diagnostics, Usage Data, Purchases, Other Data.

  • Gemini: Collects all 10 data types; highest total at 22 data points
  • Claude: Collects 7 types; 13 data points
  • CoPilot: Collects 7 types; 12 data points
  • Deepseek: Collects 6 types; 11 data points
  • ChatGPT: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
  • Perplexity: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
  • Grok: Collects 4 types; 7 data points
141 points

Locally run AI: 0

permalink
report
reply
17 points

Are there tutorials on how to do this? Should it be set up on a server on my local network??? How hard is it to set up? I have so many questions.

permalink
report
parent
reply
25 points
*

I recommend GPT4all if you want run locally on your PC. It is super easy.

If you want to run in a separate server. Ollama + some kind of web UI is the best.

Ollama can also be run locally but IMO it take more learning than GUI app like GPT4all.

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

If by more learning you mean learning

ollama run deepseek-r1:7b

Then yeah, it’s a pretty steep curve!

If you’re a developer then you can also search “$MyFavDevEnv use local ai ollama” to find guides on setting up. I’m using Continue extension for VS Codium (or Code) but there’s easy to use modules for Vim and Emacs and probably everything else as well.

The main problem is leveling your expectations. The full Deepseek is a 671b (that’s billions of parameters) and the model weights (the thing you download when you pull an AI) are 404GB in size. You need so much RAM available to run one of those.

They make distilled models though, which are much smaller but still useful. The 14b is 9GB and runs fine with only 16GB of ram. They obviously aren’t as impressive as the cloud hosted big versions though.

permalink
report
parent
reply
11 points

Check out Ollama, it’s probably the easiest way to get started these days. It provides tooling and an api that different chat frontends can connect to.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

https://ollama.ai/, this is what I’ve been using for over a year now, new models come out regularly and you just “ollama pull <model ID>” and then it’s available to run locally. Then you can use docker to run https://www.openwebui.com/ locally, giving it a ChatGPT-style interface (but even better and more configurable and you can run prompts against any number of models you select at once.)

All free and available to everyone.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I used this a while back, it was pretty straightforward https://github.com/nathanlesage/local-chat

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

If you want to start playing around immediately, try Alpaca if Linux, LMStudio if Windows. See if it works for you, then move from there.

Alpaca actually runs its own Ollama instance.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
*

And if you want to be 100% sure that Alpaca doesn’t send any info anywhere, you can restrict it’s network access in Flatseal as it’s a flatpak.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Ollama recently became a flatpak extension for Alpaca but it’s a one-click install from the Alpaca software management entry. All storage locations are the same so no need to re-DL any open models or remake tweaked models from the previous setup.

permalink
report
parent
reply
13 points
*

If only my hardware could support it…

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

I can actually use locally some smaller models on my 2017 laptop (though I have increased the RAM to 16 GB).

You’d be surprised how mich can be done with how little.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

It’s possible to run local AI on a Raspberry Pi, it’s all just a matter of speed and complexity. I run Ollama just fine on the two P-cores of my older i3 laptop. Granted, running it on the CUDA-accelerator (GFX card) on my main rig is beyond faster.

permalink
report
parent
reply
104 points

Me when Gemini (aka google) collects more data than anyone else:

Not really shocked, we all know that google sucks

permalink
report
reply
33 points

I would hazard a guess that the only reason those others aren’t as high is because they don’t have the same access to data. It’s not that they don’t want to, they simply can’t (yet).

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Which is good (for now). Glad I don’t use that shit

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point
Deleted by creator
permalink
report
parent
reply
58 points

Who would have guessed that the advertising company collects a lot of data

permalink
report
reply
29 points

And I can’t possibly imagine that Grok actually collects less than ChatGPT.

permalink
report
parent
reply
30 points

Data from surfshark aka nordvpn lol. Take it with a few chunks of salt

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Yeah I feel like there’s a supposedly missing somewhere. We don’t know their servers so at the very least ‘user content’ is based on trust.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points
*

Skill issue probably. They want to collect more but Musk’s shitty hires can’t figure it out. /s

permalink
report
parent
reply
49 points

DeepSeek at home: None

permalink
report
reply
5 points

How much VRAM does your machine have? Are you using open webui?

permalink
report
parent
reply
-4 points

Doesn’t the official local app still have telemetry? I might be remembering wrong

permalink
report
parent
reply
21 points

You just use the model in an opensource program, not theirs.

permalink
report
parent
reply
28 points
*

Back in the day, malware makers could only dream of collecting as much data as Gemini does.

permalink
report
reply

Privacy

!privacy@lemmy.ml

Create post

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

  • Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
  • Don’t promote proprietary software
  • Try to keep things on topic
  • If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
  • Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
  • Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

Community stats

  • 7.2K

    Monthly active users

  • 3.5K

    Posts

  • 96K

    Comments