I read an earlier discussion here on privacy but I have a few questions. From what I read it seems that the prompt, the response (or created image) are not stored long term on perchance servers. However, I may have been misreading but it seems that the creator of whatever generator you are using CAN see the prompts and results (ostensibly for logging purposes). It also seems that the creator can see the IP addresses that are sending the requests. These two pieces of data may not be directly linked in what the creator sees, but it seems like there would be ways (e.g., temporal analysis) of determining what IPs correspond to what prompts. Of course, I’m sure most creators don’t do this, but my point is that technically you don’t really have privacy if you’re using someone else’s generator.

So, is there a way of checking which generators log what data? I’m not really sure how all this works, so I apologize if I am way off the mark…

  • perchance@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    It’s a good underlying question, despite some misunderstandings¹. Your overall point here is this:

    technically you don’t really have privacy if you’re using someone else’s generator.

    which is correct, and is unfortunately how the internet works in general. I.e. any webpage on the internet can do whatever it wants with the data that you input into it. I must stress that Perchance generators are no different to any other webpage on the internet in this regard.

    (As Vionet20 mentioned, I wrote some related comments here, which includes info about how Perchance sandboxes generators, which means that in terms of privacy from ads/trackers, Perchance is arguably much more private than the average ad-supported website, since ads/trackers aren’t able to see what you input into Perchance generators at all, ever.)

    That said, I’ve just added a feature which allows you to “lock down” a generator so that it can only communicate with external servers that you explicitly specify, so data can’t leave your browser unless you allow it to. Ideally this would be a feature that’s built into web browsers themselves, but until then this is an improvement.

    Here’s the explainer:

    https://perchance.org/custom-content-security-policy?$csp

    TL;DR: Add ?$csp to the end of the generator URL (like you see in the above URL) to prevent it from making requests to external servers, which means your data will always remain in your local browser storage only. But be sure to read the above-linked page to e.g. see how to add exceptions for generators that need it, since the default filter is quite strict.

    Alternate/additional tips to protect your privacy on the web:

    • As mentioned on the above page, you can use a VPN, and you can also make sure you never input personal info (e.g. your real name) into any web page unless you trust it. This is the most simple and practical approach to privacy on the internet.
    • Perchance-specific tip: You can fork a generator to make your own copy, so once you’ve checked it then you can be sure it won’t change. That said, you should also be sure to fork any plugins that it imports (ones that aren’t ‘official’, at least).
    • Mostly Perchance-specific since other websites tend to have minified/obfuscated code: You can copy the code of a generator, and/or things it imports, and ask an AI like ChatGPT/Claude/DeepSeek to analyse it for any data exfiltration.
    • You may be interested in running AI models locally, which is by far the best way privately use AI models - if you can afford the hardware that’s required (i.e. one or more high end gaming GPUs): https://www.reddit.com/r/SillyTavernAI and https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA and https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/

    @[email protected]

    ¹ Misunderstanding: “ostensibly for logging purposes” - no, rather, it’s because they literally wrote the entire application/experience/game that you’re viewing - it’s not possible for the Perchance platform to shield your prompts from the generator author, since the author is the one writing the code that e.g. pre-processes your prompts (maybe adds styles to it, for example), sends those prompts to the AI, post-processes the results, integrates the resulting data with other plugins, etc. to create the whole experience. This does not mean that generator authors on Perchance automatically see your prompts. By default everything is private. They’d have to specifically write sneaky code to send your prompts to an external server, and that can be blocked by this new ?$csp feature. But to be honest, the best approach to privacy is to just (1) use a VPN and (2) never put personal/sensitive info into random websites on the internet. If you can’t do both of those, then try to use reputable websites/generators, since they presumably have a good track record and also have “more to lose” by screwing over users. They’ll also be under more public scrutiny as a result of being more popular.