Interesting. So they mix the requests between all DDG users before sending them to “underlying model providers”. The providers like OAI and Anthropic will likely log the requests, but mixing is still a big step forward.
My question is what do they do with the open-weight models? Do they also use some external inference provider that may log the requests? Or does DDG control the inference process?
All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)
They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.
For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.
Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.
Okay that sounds like the best one could get without self-hosting. Shame they don’t have the latest open-weight models, but I’ll try it out nonetheless.
Interesting. So they mix the requests between all DDG users before sending them to “underlying model providers”. The providers like OAI and Anthropic will likely log the requests, but mixing is still a big step forward. My question is what do they do with the open-weight models? Do they also use some external inference provider that may log the requests? Or does DDG control the inference process?
All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)
They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.
For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.
Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.
Okay that sounds like the best one could get without self-hosting. Shame they don’t have the latest open-weight models, but I’ll try it out nonetheless.