Your prompts say more about you than 15 years of search history
At two in the morning, nobody googles “back pain causes”.
They type: “I’m 34, my back has hurt for three weeks since I started a new job. I can’t sleep and my partner wants me to quit. What should I do?”
Google learned what you were curious about. The chatbot just learned who you are.
But nobody typed their life into a search bar. People type it into chatbots, every day. Symptoms. Debt. The message to their ex they want to sound calmer. The bank statement they pasted in “to make sense of it”. The contract from work.
That data isn’t out there yet. You’re writing it right now.
Where your message goes
Into a server you’ve never seen. Depending on the company and your settings, it may be stored for a long time, read by reviewers, or used to train the next model.
And you don’t even have to open a chatbot anymore. AI sits in your keyboard, your email app, your notes, a browser extension. Every one of them has its own terms, and many pass your text on to someone else.
What you can do tonight
- Use the temporary chat for anything personal.
- Turn off “improve the model” in the settings.
- Leave out names, account numbers and addresses. The AI doesn’t need them.
- Before you tap an “AI” button in some app, check where the text goes.
- For the most personal stuff, use an AI that runs on your own phone.
Your phone can do this now
Two years ago, running AI yourself meant a big graphics card and a weekend of tinkering. Today a recent iPhone or Mac runs a small language model on its own chip.
It knows less than the biggest models in the cloud, and it’s slower. But to rewrite a hard message, prepare for a doctor’s visit or make sense of a bill, it’s enough. And your message never leaves the device. No server. No retention policy. No setting to hunt for.
Not all or nothing
Some things still need the cloud: today’s news, a really hard problem, a huge document. That’s fine. Just choose per message, and know what runs where.
Back to two in the morning
Same night, same back. This time you open Melo, our assistant for iPhone and Mac, and type the exact same message.
Melo runs on your phone’s own chip. It answers, helps you write down what to ask your doctor, and reminds you in the morning to call. Nothing went to a server. Nobody can read it, train on it or sell it, because it never left your hand.
Too late for the last fifteen years. Not for your next message.
Your life is not training data. Try Melo