A.I. News Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT

[Miravi]

Content source

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/moxie-marlinspike-has-a-privacy-conscious-alternative-to-chatgpt/

If you’re at all concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants can feel alarming. It’s difficult to use one without sharing personal information, which is retained by the model’s parent company. With OpenAI already testing advertising, it’s easy to imagine the same data collection that fuels Facebook and Google creeping into your chatbot conversations.

A new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, is showing what a privacy-conscious AI service might look like. Confer is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is arranged to avoid data collection, with the open-source rigor that makes Signal so trusted. Your Confer conversations can’t be used to train the model or target ads, for the simple reason that the host will never have access to them.

[...]

Confer’s free tier is limited to 20 messages a day and five active chats. Users willing to pay $35 a month will get unlimited access, along with more advanced models and personalization. That’s quite a bit more than ChatGPT’s Plus plan — but privacy doesn’t come cheap.

Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT | TechCrunch

Confer is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but your conversations can't be used for training or advertising.

techcrunch.com

 

[Parkinsond]

I do not care much about privacy.

My concern is two things, resource usage when AI agent is built-in in browser or Windows and running all the time while not required to.

The second is increasing the attack suface area.

Reprompt attack hijacked Microsoft Copilot sessions for data theft

Researchers identified an attack method dubbed "Reprompt" that could allow attackers to infiltrate a user's Microsoft Copilot session and issue commands to exfiltrate sensitive data.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

 

[simmerskool]

fwiw I sometimes use Proton's Lumo chatting from its webpage. iirc no trackers, chat is encrypted and deleted, (that's their claim).

 

[Zero Knowledge]

Moxie to the rescue! So many good things have come from him, SSLstrip type attacks & Signal. Will test this out.