{"id":377859,"date":"2026-01-19T03:01:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T03:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/377859\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T03:01:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T03:01:13","slug":"moxie-marlinspike-has-a-privacy-conscious-alternative-to-chatgpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/377859\/","title":{"rendered":"Moxie Marlinspike has a privacy-conscious alternative to ChatGPT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you\u2019re at all concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants can feel alarming. It\u2019s difficult to use one without sharing personal information, which is retained by the model\u2019s parent company. With OpenAI <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/index\/our-approach-to-advertising-and-expanding-access\/\" target=\"_blank\">already testing advertising<\/a>, it\u2019s easy to imagine the same data collection that fuels Facebook and Google creeping into your chatbot conversations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A new project, launched in December by Signal co-founder Moxie Marlinspike, is showing what a privacy-conscious AI service might look like. <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/confer.to\/\" target=\"_blank\">Confer<\/a> is designed to look and feel like ChatGPT or Claude, but the backend is arranged to avoid data collection, with the open-source rigor that makes Signal so trusted. Your Confer conversations can\u2019t be used to train the model or target ads, for the simple reason that the host will never have access to them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For Marlinspike, those protections are a response to the intimate nature of the service.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s a form of technology that actively invites confession,\u201d says Marlinspike. \u201cChat interfaces like ChatGPT know more about people than any other technology before. When you combine that with advertising, it\u2019s like someone paying your therapist to convince you to buy something.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ensuring that privacy requires several different systems working in concert. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">First, Confer encrypts messages to and from the system using <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/confer.to\/blog\/2025\/12\/passkey-encryption\/\" target=\"_blank\">the WebAuthn passkey system<\/a>. (Unfortunately, that standard works best on mobile devices or Macs running Sequoia, although you can also make it work on Windows or Linux with a password manager.) <a rel=\"nofollow noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/confer.to\/blog\/2026\/01\/private-inference\/\" target=\"_blank\">On the server side<\/a>, all Confer\u2019s inference processing is done in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), with remote attestation systems in place to verify the system hasn\u2019t been compromised. Inside that, there\u2019s an array of open-weight foundation models handling whatever query comes in.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The result is a lot more complicated than a standard inference setup (which is fairly complicated already), but it delivers on Confer\u2019s basic promise to users. As long as those protections are in place, you can have sensitive conversations with the model without any information leaking out.<\/p>\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Confer\u2019s free tier is limited to 20 messages a day and five active chats. Users willing to pay $35 a month will get unlimited access, along with more advanced models and personalization. That\u2019s quite a bit more than ChatGPT\u2019s Plus plan \u2014 but privacy doesn\u2019t come cheap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re at all concerned about privacy, the rise of AI personal assistants can feel alarming. It\u2019s difficult&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377860,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[554,59,25801,143687,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-377859","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-llm","11":"tag-moxie-marlinspike","12":"tag-technology","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}