Simple Privacy Fix #6
Tips to Use AI More Privately
The Issue
Every time you type a question into ChatGPT, Gemini, or another cloud AI tool, that conversation leaves your device and lands on a server you don’t control. It can be stored, reviewed by staff, used to train future models, or handed over under a legal request — and once it’s out of your hands, you have no real way to know what happens to it next.
The Privacy Risk
For a quick recipe idea, none of that matters much. But the moment you ask an AI to help with something personal — a medical concern, a legal question, a difficult email, anything about your finances or your family — the question of who else might eventually see it becomes a lot more real. Most people never chose that trade-off; it came bundled with a tool that felt too convenient to think twice about.
The good news: you don’t have to choose between using AI and protecting your privacy. There are three ways to close that gap, in order of how much control you get.
Run AI Fully Offline
The strongest option: skip the server entirely. Running an AI model on your own computer means your questions never leave the room you’re sitting in.
Runs Fully Offline
A free app that runs open AI models entirely on your own hardware — no account, no subscription, no data ever sent anywhere. Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and most laptops from the last few years handle it comfortably. Once a model is downloaded, it keeps working with your Wi-Fi turned off. For model recommendations and a full walkthrough, see our post Run AI Locally And Keep It Private.
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Choose a Privacy-Friendly Provider
Worth understanding first: none of the three tools below train their own frontier AI models. What they add is a privacy layer in front of models that already exist — stripping identifying information from your prompt, refusing to log or train on it, and in one case, going as far as cryptographically proving no one can see it at all. That’s a meaningfully different trade-off than going straight to a model’s own provider, since you get access to strong models without your identity being attached to the request.
These are the tools we personally use and recommend, and none require an account for basic use.
Venice.aiZero Data Retention
The only one of these three offering open, uncensored models plus real image generation and editing. Beyond its zero-retention architecture, Venice also runs TEE and full end-to-end encrypted inference modes — added March 2026 — where not even Venice’s own infrastructure can see your prompts, backed by cryptographic attestation rather than a policy promise. We cover how that works in Private AI Inference — From Trust to Proof. The free tier is thin (10 text / 15 image prompts a day), so we’d point regular users to Pro ($18/mo) rather than treat the free tier as a daily driver.
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LeoNo Logs, No Account
Built into the Brave browser — the same one we recommend in our browsing fix — Leo only works inside Brave, not as a standalone destination like the other two. That’s exactly what makes it the best pick for summarizing an article, a PDF, or a video while you’re already browsing, since it reads the page you’re on without you copying anything anywhere. No account, no IP logging, and conversations aren’t used for training. The free tier (Llama 3.1, Claude Haiku, and others) handles everyday questions and summaries well; Premium ($14.99/mo) adds Claude Sonnet and Opus plus higher limits.
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Duck.aiAnonymous, No Account
DuckDuckGo strips identifying information before your prompt ever reaches the underlying model, and holds providers to contracts barring them from training on it — a straightforward anonymizing layer in front of models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others. Works well for simple, everyday tasks without any setup. Daily limits exist but aren’t published and vary by model — expect them to bite sooner on the more capable ones.
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Also worth knowing: Proton Lumo is a strong pick if you’re already in the Proton ecosystem — genuine zero-access encryption on stored chat history, Swiss jurisdiction, no account required. Worth knowing before you rely on it, though: its live inference layer is trust-based rather than cryptographically verified the way Venice’s is, and Proton doesn’t disclose which models power it. We go deeper on that distinction in Private AI Inference — From Trust to Proof. Infomaniak’s Euria is a free, Swiss-hosted option also worth a look. We haven’t tested either extensively enough to give them a full recommendation here, but both are credible.
Use Commercial AI Carefully
The newest, most capable models and tools are often only available from commercial providers — that’s simply where the frontier sits right now. Used thoughtfully, that’s a reasonable trade-off for the right task.
- Check the training/“improve the model” toggle in your account’s privacy settings — don’t assume the default protects you. Most major providers ship these turned on, and menus move around often enough that it’s worth checking again periodically.
- Use temporary or incognito chat modes for anything sensitive.
- Keep real names, health details, financial specifics, and anything you wouldn’t post publicly out of your prompts, regardless of what the settings say.
Settings menus change constantly across providers, so rather than list steps that’ll go stale, we’d point you to the TrustScan Opt-Out Hub, which keeps current click-paths for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others in one place.
From the Blog
Further reading from the Pretty Simple Privacy blog.
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