Sure, when chatbots aren’t outright hallucinating, they can be helpful tools for gathering information, generating ideas, and completing tasks.
But some of the biggest players in the AI chatbot space—including OpenAI, Google, and Meta—aren’t exactly known for strong privacy protections. So you have to have a lot of blind faith that the data you give to their chatbots won’t be used in ways you might not like, such as building a profile around you and your prompt history for the purposes of advertising or tracking.
So, what’s a person to do if they don’t trust Big Tech with their chatbot data? Give up AI chatbots entirely? Luckily, they don’t have to.
I’ve been testing out a relatively small player in the AI chatbot market for a few weeks now called Duck.ai. It offers access to some of the most powerful LLMs out there while protecting my privacy from them.
Now, I can’t imagine myself ever going back to using one of the behemoths directly.
ChatGPT without the privacy fears
DuckDuckGo is best known for its privacy-focused search engine. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn’t track your search history or create a profile of your online activity. This privacy-first approach is one reason Apple, another company that values user privacy, allows people to set DuckDuckGo as the default search engine in its Safari browser—and it’s the main reason many choose DuckDuckGo, which was founded in 2008, over Google.
A few years ago, DuckDuckGo entered the AI chatbot market with the launch of Duck.ai. This chatbot differs from most major ones, such as ChatGPT from OpenAI or Gemini from Google, in two key ways.
