Recently a user posted a comment on one of my posts about Qwen secretly sending information over the internet even if run locally.

Is there any privacy concern for locally run models to share your conversations or data? What if they can connect to the internet via a tool or MCP?

  • TheCornCollector@piefed.zipEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    I think I saw a similar comment on here last month. It was a user saying that Gemma claimed to send his chats to Google. Which is clearly a hallucination.

    I’m not a professional or expert on anything security and/or AI related but this is my take:

    • In general there will not be data sent anywhere if you use the big/trustworthy open-source backends.
    • Unless there are bigger security issues the model files shouldn’t contain such code.
    • Data could be sent using MCP/tool calling but you can see each tool call as it is happening so it can’t be hidden.

    If you really don’t trust something you can always try to use a network sniffer