That’s really cool (not the auto opt-in thing). If I understand correctly, that system looks like it offers pretty strong theoretical privacy guarantees (assuming their closed-source client software works as they say, with sending fake queries and all that for differential privacy). If the backend doesn’t work like they say, they could infer what landmark is in an image when finding the approximate minimum distance to embeddings in their DB, but with the fake queries they can’t be sure which one is real. They can’t see the actual image either way as long as the “128-bit post-quantum” encryption algorithm doesn’t have any vulnerabilies (and the closed source software works as described).

Tor for browsing is similar to a VPN. I2p and Tribbler for downloads is also similar. You could also just rent a cheap VPS and set up your own VPN. There’s a high chance people will be doing illegal shit through a VPN-like services, so I don’t think a p2p VPN-like service where everyone is like an exit node is viable.

Do you remember when it was commonly advised to use fake names and birthdays on online forms, and when “spyware” was a term?

If it’s a modern US Samsung model originally provided by a carrier, you can’t. A long time ago, people used to find/use security exploits for Samsung phones, but I think they just don’t care much anymore since you can buy international versions or other bootloader unlockable phones.

A long time ago, I used Syncthing to do this. Sometimes there would be file conflicts, which was a pain to resolve, so I switched to BitWarden (using their server for syncing) and have been using it ever since.

It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.

I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.