Late at night, the confidant many people turn to isn’t a friend or a doctor: it’s a chatbot. New research from Proton, the Swiss privacy company, reported by TechRadar, puts numbers on it, and on the contradiction at its heart.
What the survey found
- Two-thirds (66 per cent) of British AI users have discussed at least one sensitive topic with an AI assistant.
- The most common: personal finance (33 per cent), work or career problems (32 per cent), mental health (27 per cent) and relationships (20 per cent).
- Yet 42 per cent of UK users have little or no trust in AI companies to protect their private information, and 11 per cent don’t trust them at all.
- 64 per cent worry their conversations are being used to build advertising or marketing profiles; 52 per cent worry their secrets are being used to train future AI models.
- 82 per cent said they would be more likely to use a chatbot designed around privacy.
Why confide in something you don’t trust? “Freedom from judgment,” the report concludes: a chatbot answers at any hour and never reacts with surprise or embarrassment.
AI is learning far more about us than a search engine ever could. We’re not just asking questions. We’re sharing deeply personal context about our health, finances and relationships. And when technology knows that much about us, privacy can’t be an afterthought.
Eamonn Maguire, Director of AI Engineering at Proton, quoted in TechRadar
Proton, which runs its own privacy-focused chatbot, Lumo, and has launched a tool called AI Paper Trail to show how much a typical conversation reveals, is of course not a neutral party here. But the worry in its numbers is familiar. As Maguire put it, people are handing AI companies “their inner lives and biggest secrets” on the assumption that they will protect them, when “AI’s business model depends on learning from them.”
The simplest privacy rule for AI: where does it run?
A privacy policy is a promise. Where the computing happens is a fact. When a chatbot runs on a company’s servers, everything you type travels there, and what happens next depends on that company’s settings, its business model and whoever can legally demand its records. When a model runs on your own device, what you give it stays on your device.
On-device models have limits: they are smaller, and for open-ended conversation they are not as capable as the big cloud models. For a focused job, though, a small local model is enough, and it is the only kind that can’t leak what it never sent.
Five habits that keep a chatbot conversation smaller
First, open the chatbot’s settings and look for the option that lets your conversations be used to improve or train its models; most services offer a way to turn it off, and it is rarely off by default. Second, look for a temporary or private chat mode for anything sensitive, and check how long the service says it keeps those chats.
Third, leave out what identifies you or other people: full names, addresses, account numbers, health details, photos of documents. Describe the situation instead of pasting the record. Fourth, delete old conversations you no longer need; a history you don’t keep can’t be exposed later. Fifth, be careful with chatbot plug-ins and connected accounts, because each one is a new place your data can travel to.
How FireAI applies that rule
- FireAI’s AI, which explains in plain language what a connection on your Mac is, runs entirely on your Mac. What it analyses is never sent to a cloud AI and can’t end up in anyone’s training set. See the on-device AI model.
- For the AI apps you do use, the world map shows where each one connects, and per-app rules let you decide which of them may reach the internet at all.
- Paranoid mode also blocks known telemetry, so apps that report on you in the background are refused.
FireAI can’t make a cloud chatbot private, and it can’t take back what you’ve already typed into one. Two habits help: check whether your chatbot lets you turn off training on your conversations, and keep the most sensitive things (health details, account numbers, other people’s private information) out of cloud chats altogether.
Download FireAI and try it free for 17 days. FireAI is made by HisnLabs.