Recently, it turned out that talking to artificial intelligence poses some privacy risks Meta admits that he trains his AI using conversations with her (among other materials posted on its websites). Now, privacy-focused search and browser company DuckDuckGo is officially giving users the option to regain some of their anonymity, but the solution has its limitations.
DuckDuckGo AI Chatan intermediary that allows you to talk to AI chatbots and prevent them from seeing some of your information is now officially available available to everyone. You’ll be able to operate this service to talk to OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and now Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. You won’t even need a DuckDuckGo browser to access it. Just go to one of them duck.ai Or duckduckgo.com/chat. Searches made on DuckDuckGo Search will now also include a Chat tab, which will open an AI conversation on the topic you’re searching for (you can also start a search using !ai or !chat).
On the website, select a chat model and discuss as usual. This is where DuckDuckGo’s privacy features come into play.
According to DuckDuckGo, “all chats are completely anonymous: they cannot be associated with any specific person.” This means that when you talk to an AI model through DuckDuckGo, the service asks questions on your behalf, preventing the chatbot owners from seeing your IP address. Users also have a “Fire” button that allows them to instantly clear their chat and start over.
DuckDuckGo also promises that chats conducted using its service “will not be used for any AI model training.” which might make you raise your eyebrows. Even if DuckDuckGo hides your IP address, the chatbot will still send conversations with you back to its servers, right?
Well, according to DuckDuckGo, the company has “agreements with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are deleted by the providers within 30 days and that none of the chats made on [its] the platform can be used to train or improve models.”
This is where the service reaches its limits. For example, you won’t always have access to completely up-to-date models here, such as GPT-4o. The nature of these deals means DuckDuckGo must negotiate adding novel chatbots to its service, although the company promises “more to come.”
Partner companies may also store your chats on their servers for up to 30 days, which can be a concern even if DuckDuckGo says “all metadata has been removed.”
Still, it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to interacting with AI, especially since Meta forces users to submit essays about protecting their data on its own platforms (and doesn’t even give some users the option). DuckDuckGo AI chat is free within indefinite daily limitalthough DuckDuckGo says it is exploring a paid plan with higher limits and access to more advanced models.
Users who would prefer not to see any AI on DuckDuckGo can turn off the novel feature Search settings menu.
