Chatting with AI has proven to be a bit of a privacy risk as of late, with Meta admitting that it trains its AI by using your conversations with it (among other material posted to its services). Now, privacy-focused search engine and browser company DuckDuckGo is officially giving users a way to claw back some anonymity, but the solution does have its limits.
DuckDuckGo AI Chat, an intermediary for talking to AI chatbots while keeping them from seeing some of your information, is now officially available for everyone. You’ll be able to use the service to talk to OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 Turbo, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku, and now Meta’s Llama 3 and Mistral’s Mixtral 8x7B. You won’t even need DuckDuckGo’s browser to access it. Simply navigate to either duck.ai or duckduckgo.com/chat. Searches made on DuckDuckGo’s search engine will also now feature a Chat tab that will open up an AI conversation on the searched topic (or you could begin your search with !ai or !chat).
Once on the page, pick your chat model and discuss as usual. This is where DuckDuckGo’s privacy features come into play.
According to DuckDuckGo, “all chats are completely anonymous: they cannot be traced back to any one individual.” This means that when you talk to an AI model via DuckDuckGo, the service will ask your questions on your behalf, preventing the chatbot’s owners from seeing your IP address. Users also have a “Fire” button, which can instantly clear the chat to start over.
DuckDuckGo also promises that chats made using its service “are not used for any AI model training.” which might have you raising an eyebrow. Even if DuckDuckGo is hiding your IP address, the chatbot will still send its conversations with you back to its servers, right?
Well, according to DuckDuckGo, the company has “agreements in place with all model providers to ensure that any saved chats are deleted by the providers within 30 days, and that none of the chats made on [its] platform can be used to train or improve the models.”
This is where the service hits its limits. For instance, you won’t always get access to totally up-to-date models here, like GPT-4o. The nature of these agreements means DuckDuckGo has to negotiate to add new chatbots to its service, although the company promises “more to come.”
There’s also the ability for partnered companies to keep your chats in its servers for up to 30 days, which can be concerning even if DuckDuckGo says “all metadata is removed.”
Still, it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to interacting with AI, especially as Meta is forcing users to submit essays to protect their data on its own platforms (and not even giving some users the option). DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is free within an unspecified daily limit, although DuckDuckGo says it is exploring a paid plan with higher limits and access to more advanced models.
Users who would rather not see any AI in DuckDuckGo can disable the new feature from this Search Settings menu.