Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Running local LLMs for privacy as an alternative to ChatGPT, MS Copilot etc.? (www.youtube.com)

submitted 2 days ago by ShotDonkey@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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What are your thoughts on #privacy and #itsecurity regarding the #LocalLLMs you use? They seem to be an alternative to ChatGPT, MS Copilot etc. which basically are creepy privacy black boxes. How can you be sure that local LLMs do not A) "phone home" or B) create a profile on you, C) that their analysis is restricted to the scope of your terminal? As far as I can see #ollama and #lmstudio do not provide privacy statements.

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[–] AnAmericanPotato@programming.dev 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

As far as I can see #ollama and #lmstudio do not provide privacy statements.

That's because they are not online services (which is a good thing!). Online services like ChatGPT and desktop applications like LM Studio are not in the same product category.

LM Studio is more akin to, say, VLC or Notepad++ (which also do not have privacy policies). These are desktop applications that have some limited network functions (like autoupdates).

LM Studio does offer details of which features require internet access and which are fully offline here: https://lmstudio.ai/docs/offline . In short: everything important is offline. It has built-in search features so you can find and download models from Huggingface, and it also has an autoupdate feature to find and download new versions. You could run it on an airgapped system (or more likely, set it up in a container/VM without network access), and simply load in model files manually if you prefer.

Personally I recommend LM Studio, because it's super easy to set up and use but still quite powerful.