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.
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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.
techcrunch.com
