Privacy

I know I could and should encrypt whole drives but I want another layer of protect specific folders when my devices are unlocked, a password. I want the folders to behave like regular folders where I can add or remove files as usual, without a clunky UX like password protected zips. I looked it up and didn't find any straightforward solutions.

A chart titled "What Kind of Data Do AI Chatbots Collect?" lists and compares seven AI chatbots—Gemini, Claude, CoPilot, Deepseek, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok—based on the types and number of data points they collect as of February 2025. The categories of data include: Contact Info, Location, Contacts, User Content, History, Identifiers, Diagnostics, Usage Data, Purchases, Other Data.

• Gemini: Collects all 10 data types; highest total at 22 data points
• Claude: Collects 7 types; 13 data points
• CoPilot: Collects 7 types; 12 data points
• Deepseek: Collects 6 types; 11 data points
• ChatGPT: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
• Perplexity: Collects 6 types; 10 data points
• Grok: Collects 4 types; 7 data points

It can remember specific, targeted things about you that perhaps tracking from cookies couldn't easily detect from you. I think the free AIs will exploit everything you type into it and deliver specific targeted advertisements for products instead perhaps of giving longer, more useful explanations.

Around the time / maybe just before OpenAI wanted to become a profit-driven company, it implemented memory, obviously for a specific reason!

Thoughts?

Fastbackgroundcheck. com says there's info on me on truthfinder, spokeo, peoplefinders and instantcheckmate. When I try going through all four of those sites takes a super long time, including a few times in the past when I tried getting reports on myself.

The progress bars reach 100% and reset continously. If these sites are legimate like some reddit users claim, then why or be upfront about wanting me to pay? Right now I'm convinced that these sites are snake oil, maybe they work if you pay but the behavior of the free options turn me off. They act 100% like typical scam websites, the kind that asks you to complete three surveys on external sites with fake progress bars.

Basic info like my full name, address, age, and siblings can be found with search engines easily but I feel like there's no point in trying to wipe it if there aren't methods that could definitely work.

I haven't kept up with all the news about this, so is there a definitive yes or no answer that Mozilla sells or even shares user information with partners such as Google? Google is paying Mozilla for something.

My small company (less than 30 employees) has been using Skype for internal group meetings and messaging. Since it's closing, we're looking for alternatives.

I think few people in the company are privacy minded (one of the higher ups had to get scolded to stop using some random AI to listen to all his meetings and write summaries), so we need something with a low barrier to entry.

We have basically no IT department, so self hosting would be a challenge. We do self host a redmine server via docker, and we have to connect to it via VPN when we're off-site (we have several full time remote employees).

Our feature requirements are:

-Group and individual messaging

-Screen sharing

-Meetings up to 2 hours

-Inexpensive

-Meetings with up to 10 participants

-Windows (some people use Skype from their phones also, but not a requirement)

-Minimal friction to setup and use

-Minimal bugs (mature)

Some of the ideas floated:

-Teams

-Discord

-Google Meet

-Signal

-Telegram

-Jami

I really don't think we could pull off Matrix, but am I wrong? Which of these ideas bothers you the least? Is there something else I'm overlooking?