Security quotes of the week

The same architectural principles apply to AI—perhaps the most critical battleground for digital power today. Centralized AI services don't just mine your data for corporate benefit; they can shape your thinking, limit your capabilities, and make you dependent on their infrastructure. But it doesn't need to be that way.

We're already seeing the emergence of open source models, opportunities to control your own system prompts (as DuckDuckGo recently introduced), and smaller distilled models that work in decentralized environments. Projects are emerging to give people more power over their own data, letting you decide how AI can interact with your information, rather than the AI system slurping up everything it can about you.

This isn't about technical preferences—it's about the difference between renting someone else's vision of how you should think and work versus building your own.

You can take care to avoid enshittification, you can even make a fetish out of it, but without addressing these systemic failings, your individual actions will only get you so far. Sure, use privacy-enhancing tools like Signal to communicate with other people, but if the only way to get your kid to their little league game is to join the carpool group on Facebook, you're going to hemorrhage data about everything you do to Meta.

Likewise, you can use privacy-preserving adblockers in your browser, but the instant you've got to do business with a monopoly that requires you to use their app, you will be totally helpless before them, because anti-circumvention law felonizes modifying an app so it preserves your privacy.