I struggle with the amount of data trail I leave online. With the meteoric rise of AI my privacy paranoia has gone up as well. I feel a clear unease when filling out my email address when signing up to new AI tools, but I also don’t want to miss out on a tool that makes me more productive. Therefore I am deliberate about what I feed to my online AI tools, and what things I avoid talking about and only tell my local AI models.
Is there a way to augment my deepest thoughts with AI tools, without leaking them to data brokers?
When I go out to have a walk I often put my headphones on and push record on my voice recorder app and start discussing thoughts with myself. It helps me structure my thinking in an actionable way. A lot of things are crap and just fleeting thoughts, but every couple of minutes there is a new thought that inspires me into action. I follow new leads of thinking and come up with new ideas this way. There are often long pauses in the recording, as I am uncertain about things and filter my thoughts as they come and go.
Before I had my OpenClaw bot Henk I manually opened the audio file in OpenWhisper on my Mac to have the file transcribed. It runs locally and therefore none of my thoughts leave my machine. It stops me from self-censoring my thoughts. Privacy for me is not about neighbors looking through the window, it is about how freely I allow my thoughts to wander.
Key insight: I want maximum experimentation, but minimal exposure
I want to use every new tool out there, but in doing so I make myself more exposed to all sorts of privacy concerns. The profiling that can be done based on all of my emotional states and intentions is gold to data brokers. On the other hand there is so much to learn about myself if I embrace this technology fully. So upgrading my infrastructure to run bigger models allows me the freedom to think without surveillance.