Comments
By cheschire 2025-11-1619:19 When I occasionally go back and rewatch the 1995 classic Hackers, I lament Cereal's naive assertion that it was Orwellian back then when when your name would go through only 15 computers a day.
>Imagine a world where your data isn’t trapped in distant data centers. Instead, it’s close to home—in a secure data wallet or pod, under your control.
Don’t have to imagine it. This is how it was just a few decades ago.
By fsflover 2025-11-1620:34 This is also how my phone works today.
I don't understand how are LLMs and privacy connected, sorry; and I don't get it from the article.
The author cites AI therapists, but the people chose to use it themselves? Nobody is forcing them?
By CSSer 2025-11-1620:44 LLMs can be used to quickly mulch data into a digestible format that at least used to take effort. Friction is a natural deterrent for bad behavior. Beyond that, however, is the fact that your user interactions with most applications used to be quite coarse. A "customer story" was just that: a story we crafted from the data we have available to us about our customers. We have to build it from heuristics like bounce rate, scroll distance, and other thorough, idiosyncratic and diligent abandonment metrics.
Now why bother? Your customer will ask their silver ball (LLMs) anything and everything, and you can directly do bulk analysis on (in theory) the entire interaction, including all of your customer's emotions available via text.
Lastly, your customers are now eager about this tool, so they're excited to integrate/connect everything to it. In a rush to satisfy customers, many companies have lazily built LLM integrations that could even undermine their business model. This pushes yet more data into the LLM. This isn't just telemetry like file names, this is full read access to all of your files. How is that not connected to privacy?
By imiric 2025-11-1623:08 This is quite intellectually lazy.
The article mentions numerous examples of how "AI" services erode privacy. And, really, you don't need anyone to tell you these things. If you're remotely technically inclined, which is a fair assumption on this forum, you should be well aware of how these companies operate. It would be more interesting to discuss other related points the article brings up, rather than the known connection between LLMs and privacy.
