If you care in any respect about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants could also be alarming. It's difficult to make use of one without sharing personal information stored by the model's parent company. With OpenAI is already testing promotingIt's easy to assume the identical data collection that powers Facebook and Google creeping into your chatbot conversations.
A brand new project launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike shows what a privacy-conscious AI service could seem like. Lend is designed to feel and appear like ChatGPT or Claude, however the backend is designed to avoid data collection, with the open source rigor that makes Signal so trustworthy. Your Confer conversations can’t be used to coach the model or goal ads, for the easy reason that the host never has access to them.
For Marlinspike, these protections are a response to the intimate nature of the service.
“It’s a type of technology that actively invites confession,” says Marlinspike. “Chat interfaces like ChatGPT know more about people than any technology before. When you mix that with promoting, it's like someone paying your therapist to persuade you to purchase something.”
To ensure data protection, several different systems must work together.
First, Confer co-encrypts messages to and from the system the WebAuthn passkey system. (Unfortunately, this standard works best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, although you can too make it work on Windows or Linux using a password manager.) On the server sideAll of Confer's inference processing occurs in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) with distant attestation systems to confirm that the system has not been compromised. Inside is a set of open weight foundation models that process every incoming request.
The result’s way more complicated than a normal inference setup (which is already quite complicated), however it keeps Confer's fundamental promise to users. As long as these protective measures are in place, you possibly can have confidential conversations with the model without information leaking out.
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Confer's free tier is proscribed to twenty messages per day and five lively chats. Users willing to pay $35 per thirty days get unlimited access in addition to advanced models and personalization. That's significantly greater than ChatGPT's Plus plan – but privacy doesn't come low cost.
