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
You must log in or register to comment.
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 :)
- 0 users online
- 124 users / day
- 1.05K users / week
- 1.3K users / month
- 4.58K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 3.67K Posts
- 93.3K Comments
- Modlog
Duck.ai
Wow, it’s a whole new level of f*cked up when Zuck collects more data than the Winnie the Pooh (DeepSeek). 😳
The idea that US apps are somehow better than Chinese apps when it comes to collecting and selling user data is complete utter propaganda.
Don’t use either. Until Trump, I still considered CCP spyware more dangerous because they would be collecting info that could be used to blackmail US politicians and businesses. Now, it’s a coin flip. In either case, use EU or FOSS apps whenever possible.
Gemini: “Other Data”
Like, what’s fucking left!?
The Broligarchy: “Everything.”
Me: Squints Pours glowing demon tanning lotion on ground
Trump: “You dare dispute my rule?! And you would have these… mongrels… come here to die?”
Open Source Metaverse online. Launching Anti-StarLink missiles…
Warning. FOSS Metaverse alternative launch detected.
The Broligarchy: “This was not how it was supposed to be…”
Me: “Times change. But war, war never changes.”
…
“We will never be slaves. But we WILL be online. For the Open Source Metaverse we deserve!”
Anyway, hopefully that’s the real future in some sense. The metaverse is, technologically, in a state resembling 1995’s World Wide Web. We can stop the changes that made social media happen the first time, but that comes at a grave cost of it’s own… Zero tolerance for interference with the FOSS paradigm. This means no censorship even for the most vile of content, and no government authority over online activity ever again. It also means we have less than 150 years to become immortal because having children inherently puts kids at risk of sexual exploitation, so everyone - literally everyone - must be made infertile permanently to make that impossible.
Life extension is actually plausible, and omnispermicide would make denying it a war crime. That is the only fix I can see, but all of you would never pay it. That is why I stopped writing; every goddamn story and society at large championed “anti-escapism” in 2017 and onwards, and I will NEVER forgive you all for that. Fuck reality. I Have No Truth and I Must Dream. I want to die because I hate you all.
anyone whos competent in the matter: what about the french competition chat.mistral.ai
+1 for Mistral, they were the first (or one of the first) Apache open source licensed models. I run Mistral-7B and variant fine tunes locally, and they’ve always been really high quality overall. Mistral-Medium packed a punch (mid-size obviously) but it definitely competes with the big ones at least.
Almost none of this data is possible to collect when using Tor Browser
Nope, these services almost always require user login, eventually tied to cell number (ie non disposable) and associate user content and other data points with account. Nonetheless user prompts are always collected. How they’re used is a good question.
Use a third party API. Pay with monero.
Yes it is possible to create disposable-isque api keys for different uses. The monetary cost is the cost of privacy and of not having hardware to run things locally.
If you have reliable privacy friendly api vendor suggestions then do share. While I do not need such services now, it can a good future reference.
I think I only used chatgpt once to play around, and it was one of those. I dont remember the name, sorry
Am I missing something? What do the numbers mean in relation to the type? Sub types?
It’s labeled “Unique data points”. See the number 2 - Usage Data for Gemini, there’s an arrow with label there.
Thank you I totally missed that.
perhaps it’s the limit imof each data type?!
gemini harvests only your first four cobtacts, your last two locations, and so on.
how does one defeat that? have fewer than four friends and don’t go out!
Ask people for their phone number to add to your contacts and give them your phone for a day
Note this is if you use their apps. Not the api. Not through another app.
Not that we have any real info about who collects/uses what when you use the API
Yeah we do, they list it in privacy policies. Many of these they can’t really collect even if they wanted to
Who TF using Grok.
Most of my workforce strangely enough. They claim it’s the best for them in terms of mathematics, but I can’t find that to be a good reason.
Isn’t deepseek better for that?
In my experience it depends on the math. Every model seems to have different strengths based on a wide berth of prompts and information.
That’s what I’m saying!
Fascists. Why?
I’m interested in seeing how this changes when using duck duck go front end at duck.ai
there’s no login and history is stored locally (probably remotely too)
Is there away to fake all the data they try to collect?
I just came across this article which for people who are into self hosting can take a look and participate. It’s basically a tool that generating never ending web pages with non sense that load slow (but not too slow the AI tools move on) to slow down and thus cost them more to scrape the internet if enough people are doing it. You can also hide it in a way that legit user would never see this on your site:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/ https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/
Pretty sure this is what they scrape from your device if you install their app. I dont know how else they would get access to contacts and location and stuff. So yeah you can just run it on a virtual android device and feed it garbage data, but i assume the app or their backend will detect that and throw out your data.
How about if I only use the web version?
Root, install xprivacy (or xprivacylua if your phone isn’t 10 years old).
And what about goddamn Mistral?
Its French as far as I know so at least it abides to gdpr by default.
All services you see above are provided to EU citizens, which is why they also have to abide by GDPR. GDPR does not disallow the gathering of information. Google, for example, is GDPR compliant, yet they are number 1 on that list. That’s why I would like to know if European companies still try to have a business case with personal data or not.
If it’s one thing I don’t trust its non-EU companies following GDPR. Sure they’re legally bound to, but l mean Meta doesn’t care so why should the rest.
(Yes I’m being overly dramatic about this, but I’ve lost trust ages ago in big tech companies)
Fully agree, which is also why I choose EU/Swiss made services by default
not sure about swiss, they shady as hell if you have scepticism towards rich people greed
I’m only referring to data privacy laws.
It doesn’t mean they “have to abide by GDPR” or that they “are GDPR compliant”. All it means is they appear to be GDPR compliant and pretend to respect user privacy. The sole fact that the AI chatbots are run in US-based data centres is against GDPR. The EU has had many different personal data transfer agreements with the US, all of which were canceled shortly after signing due to US corporations breaking them repeatedly (Facebook usually being the main culprit).
I tried to say that, but you were better at explaining, so thank you. Without a court case, you will essentially never know, if they are truly GDPR compliant
Just clarifying, does this report mean it’s collected while a user is using the tools, or data that is generally scraped from the internet?
They’re talking about what is being recorded while the user is using the tools (your prompts, RAG data, etc.)
Does that include generated responses?
Did a personal data export for chatGPT and it included the complete conversation, not just my input.
Nobody knows! There’s no specific disclosure that I’m aware of (in the US at least), and even if there was I wouldn’t trust any of these guys to tell the truth about it anyway.
As always, don’t do anything on the Internet that you wouldn’t want the rest of the world to find out about :)
DeepSeek at home: None
How much VRAM does your machine have? Are you using open webui?
Doesn’t the official local app still have telemetry? I might be remembering wrong
You just use the model in an opensource program, not theirs.
How?
Also llama.cpp, kobold.cpp, TabbyAPI, Aphrodite engine. There’s dozens of programs, at least, that run LLMs locally.
There’s programs like Ollama and Lmstudio that let you download LLMs and run them locally
Aren’t they supposed to collect data?
Or you could use Deepseek’s workaround and run it locally. You know, open source and all.