Don’t Sacrifice Your Privacy for AI

Disclaimer: This blog post was published prior to You.com’s latest AI advancements and may not reflect our current capabilities. You.com has transformed from a search engine to an AI assistant. With a foundation in search and the team’s AI expertise, You.com was perfectly positioned to enhance LLMs with live access to the Internet to address issues around hallucinations and transparency. As such, You.com is capable of tasks ranging from searching online to writing an essay, debugging code, creating digital art, solving complex problems, and more. Learn more about getting the most out of You.com.

You.com also offers its core technology through a suite of self-serve APIs. Get complete details about the YOU API.

Generative AI is taking the world by storm and promises to change the way we work, communicate, and search. However, as Big Tech players look to hone generative AI solutions into their own walled gardens, it seems like without the right interventions this integration will only further decrease privacy on the internet.

It turns out, AI’s privacy problem has been discussed well before this new age of generative AI. In 2017, a London hospital breached UK law and gave Alphabet’s DeepMind data on 1.6 million patients without their consent. Additionally, Microsoft boasted the largest collection of faces that anyone could use to train facial-recognition algorithms up until April 2019, when it was revealed that many were never informed that their face was included.

Today, with generative AI and prompt engineering, users can ask AI about anything, even topics that are truly sensitive. As large language models are trained on millions of pages scraped from the web, many tech players have an even greater incentive to collect and exploit your personal data to improve their systems. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there is already no possibility to check if personal information is stored, how it is used, or with whom it is shared. It’s a massive shortcoming being noticed by consumers and data regulators alike. Imagine private medical queries being traceable to your personal information, widely shared, and analyzed without your consent.

Named as one of the Top 100 inventions of 2022 by TIME magazine and part of the Salesforce Responsible AI fund, we at You.com believe that privacy is fundamental to the future of tech and AI. Our democratized AI search engine is one that you control and gives you the power to decide which data is okay to collect and for what purpose. Tools including YouChat, our AI search assistant, and YouImagine, an AI image generator, ensure privacy as the default.

Here’s how You.com allows you to stay private on the web:

You.com puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to privacy.

• – We’ve developed two complementary modes of operation: private mode and personal mode. They reinforce each other to give you the most action-oriented search engine on the planet. When looking for a customizable search experience, use personal mode. We collect a minimal amount of data to improve the product and give you a personalized experience. We don’t share that data with anyone. When you’d like an entirely private experience, use our private mode. There’s no data collection or sharing. Period.

You.com offers a zero-trace private mode — the most private search experience of any search engine, even more, private than DuckDuckGo.

• – We don’t store your queries on our servers.
• – We don’t record clicks or any other interaction with the site.
• – We ensure search partners don’t know where or from whom the queries come from. All queries come from our server’s IP address.
• – We disable all apps that need your IP address or location (e.g., location-based apps like maps, Yelp, etc.)

You.com injects privacy into all sides of our search engine and operations

• – You.com does not use any third-party pixels or attribute tracking in marketing efforts.
• – Private advertisements on You.com allow us to generate revenue so we can continue offering you a premium service for free. However, these non-invasive ads don’t collect personal data or follow you around the web.

You.com partners with other organizations to collectively strive for a more private web

You.com is one of 11 companies that signed Proton’s Privacy Pledge, which was launched in response to the public demand for an internet that gives you control of your privacy. With this pledge, we commit to five basic principles:

• – The internet should be built to serve people.
• – Organizations should only collect data that’s necessary for them to prevent abuse and deliver their services.
• – People’s data should be securely encrypted.
• – Online organizations should be transparent about their identity and software.
• – Web services should be interoperable.

See the full pledge here.

At You.com our values of trust, facts, and kindness are paramount. We commit to building a search engine that puts you first and brings privacy back to tech and AI. After all, better privacy means better internet. YOU is for you. We hope you’ll join us on this mission.

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