Hi, Pablo here
Credit cards, affairs and ChatGPT
Many years ago, when I was doing my Bachelor's thesis, I had a fun conversation with Dolors, my tutor back then. She was a smart woman, and so the interesting chats were the norm. That day we ended up discussing how people are typically concerned with their privacy, yet their banks knew so much about them and they wouldn't mind. She summed it up in a sentence that stuck with me: "The easiest way to find out if a husband is having an affair is just to read his credit card statement".
I've been using ChatGPT profusely during the last couple of years. It's not God's Mana, nor I think it will destroy the world. But it's quite useful for some stuff, and I've been pulling it up more and more frequently.
The other day I came across these guys: trymaple.ai. Long story short, it's like ChatGPT, but they use (and apparently prove) an architecture that means nobody, not even them, can see your chats. That's it, that's the selling point.
It brought back to my memory the credit cards quote, and I started scrolling through my ChatGPT history. For the first time, I looked at it with an adversarial mindset, as if I was a spy spying on myself. With an attitude of: "What can I find out about this Pablo guy here?".
I was horrified when I realised there was a lot about me you could find out in those chats. Among the many questions on coding and technical bits, some other chats gave away a lot of details of my life. And that suddenly made me feel really uncomfortable. These guys are not even charging me (I'm using their free tier) and they are sitting on all of this data... I thought to myself this couldn't end well.
I purchased a plan from Maple AI and I've replaced ChatGPT with it. Barely noticed the difference. And now I'm feeling much more calm about dropping cues on me in the chat.
I hope we see more and more zero-knowledge, E2E encrypted SaaS offerings out there. I'm surely willing to pay for them.