On 23andme there’s this social media thing, where you can connect to ‘relatives’ like second cousins and so on. I limited my access, only enough to see who used it. My name is just my initials, doesn’t show anything else really.

Enabling strongest privacy settings, and sharing as limited data as possible. If you do use it seems to be the best route. I still think potentially at some point they might actually get compromised and all users.

I’ll get 1 year free credit monitoring, and $10 bucks then. Most Americans are already hacked from the Public National Database thing. Social security numbers, emails, and rest of it.

For self-hosted, I’ll recommend Ollama and there’s several different models you can try out. Locally on your computer. It keeps the data in a file like history or something. I forgot, it has the ability to use the cloud for like ‘kim’ or something, but anything local afaik doesn’t send. You’ll have to use the 4 to 8b models, and usually they’re not as accurate, a few are ‘uncensored’ nevertheless. It lacks it.

I am not well versed in Duck.ai. I believe it doesn’t host all of its own instances, and sends some of the conversations off via API to OpenAI or even Claude. I wouldn’t trust it.

Proton Lumo is supposedly private. It’s decent “if you pay” I think their models are self-hosted, but again, their models do ‘web search’ which send your text to the web I believe. Brave, has it built in. It’s supposedly private, but as Duck.ai, it likely uses OpenAI models on some of the picks you make.

Even Gemini isn’t save. If you read, you’ll see it talk about ‘human reviewers’ so nothing is truly private. There was something in Canada, like a shooting. Where the team was flagged about a specific somebody, and decided not to contact law enforcement.

You cannot trust AI except local. I do mine differently. I try to only ask it certain questions and put a bunch of garbage in between. Like, I’ll make something up about myself, my age or whatever, ask something random, or whatever I need then add other garbage to it and delete.

I don’t like to recommend Reddit specifically. Look up /r/PoisonFountain/ it’s interesting. They try to find ways to poison AI’s database.

Just remove the .in TLD, and stop people from India from using their site. Give people that are in India like a specific time period to transfer their domain elsewhere.

I want to point out there is something that most people aren’t aware of. FED Government uses it. It’s called a law called ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986).

There’s a rule that’s so outdated. It basically says if your emails are 180 days old. It treats it as if you ‘abandoned’ it. No 4th amendment right, I’m not sure about people elsewhere. They can just access these emails with a mere subpoena without a court order or judge approval.

So if you must use any email providers with servers within the US that’s not encrypted or US based such as Gmail or Yahoo. Enable Pop3 and download it locally, delete it from your main gmail account. This will be different if it’s an employer. For me, I don’t keep it for more than 180 days.

There was one court case. It didn’t go to SCOTUS. It’s Warshak v. United States. Anything under 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals jurisdiction is I believe supposedly protected, but who knows.

I learned about this a year ago. I thought people here might want to know about it in addition to this. I’m not a lawyer. I just wanted them to know about the 180 day rule.

They’ve been at it since like 2012. He’s been fighting it that long to not be extradited, and then if he gets to the United States that’s another decade of court cases to see. NZ needs to stop being a puppet, and just say they won’t extradite him and move on.

He had that kind of money before they seized it. I believe he had to get rid of the mansion which he once had.

Movies? Just owning a dvd or bluray. It was filled with a bunch of trailers and other junk when I just wanted the movie itself to start and didn’t care for all of the other.

TV Shows?

Right when it releases, so I don’t have to see the between ads and I couldn’t actually buy it until the full season released. Even then, now they moved to streaming only, where even now you can’t buy the optical media if you want leaving you with only the option to download it. Even if you wanted to pay, they won’t let you buy it.

Music?

Instead of a bunch of music at the time, on MP3 player, I could just rip my discs or download them. If my disc was damaged, I could download. Instead of just having all of these crappy songs, I could select just the ones I want and put on cd at the time.

Software?

When I couldn’t afford it, and still refuse to pay for subscription. I usually try to use open source now other than gaming. I will buy games, on sale, on gog or steam. Provided it’s on sale, and not $60 or $80. $20 or $30? Sure.

Now? One time license? Sure.

I specifically own a computer, for dedicated cracked software and cracked games that doesn’t ever connect to the internet. So, no issue if it’s infected. For those games, I will buy them, when they’re not $80 dollars. I’ll wait until it’s $30. I only install trusted sources, but you never know.

Never will I pay $80 for a new game. Even if I want it bad. That’s beyond ridiculous.