Protection Against AI Training: How to Keep Your Data Private in Everyday Apps

Artificial intelligence is now everywhere and is no longer just a tool you actively choose to use. It’s in your search engine, your email inbox, your photo storage apps, and many other applications you use daily. However, the fundamental problem often lies hidden. It isn’t limited to the conscious use of AI assistants, where you know you’re entrusting your data to an AI. Every time you use an AI, consciously or unconsciously, the text, images, and ideas you input can contribute to training and improving future models.

This becomes particularly critical when it comes to personal matters. Information about financial difficulties or psychological issues absolutely does not belong unfiltered in standard AI chats that aren’t specifically focused on data protection. You should treat everything you enter into such a system as if it could eventually be read by someone else. The best training sources for large AI models consist of real conversations, uploaded photos, and genuine queries. This means that, in the background, actual human beings might review your chat histories or images to further develop the technology.

This guide shows you how to integrate AI efficiently into your daily work routine without compromising your most valuable data and ideas. You don’t have to give up AI; you just need to interact with it more smartly. You need to know where it’s embedded and how to mitigate the associated risks.

AI Assistants: Conscious Use and Maintaining Control

Large AI models aren’t just trained once; they are continuously improved and adapted to new use cases. The best source for this training is real user data. It’s crucial to understand that all mainstream AI providers who haven’t defined data privacy as an absolute core value will, by default, train on your data.

• ChatGPT: OpenAI also uses your chats by default to further train its models. However, you can disable this in OpenAI’s settings under “Data Controls” or “Model Improvement”.
• Gemini: Google’s AI trains on your data by default. This applies to all users, regardless of whether you use the free version or pay for a Basic, Pro, Plus, or the highly expensive Ultra subscription. While Google Account Management offers settings to restrict activity saving for AI interactions, if you disable AI training, you simultaneously lose your chat history. Google uses this rather aggressive approach to push users into continuing to share their data, as a significant part of the AI assistant’s functionality simply vanishes without the history.
• Mistral: Data usage is also enabled by default for new users here. Make sure to check your profile and toggle the training slider to “off.” For long-term users of Mistral, this slider might already be set to “off,” but double-checking is highly recommended.
• Claude: Anthropic uses anonymized data for training, but the free web version often operates under different rules than the API, which is why a manual opt-out is required here as well.
• Perplexity: This AI also trains on your inputs by default. Even if you are a paying Pro member, training occurs until you explicitly turn it off in the settings.

Additionally, you should strictly separate professional and private AI accounts and consistently pseudonymize sensitive data before pasting it.

Therefore, it is highly recommended to specifically choose AI assistants that treat data privacy as an absolute priority, rather than just writing a privacy policy because they are legally required to do so. An excellent example of this is CamoCopy from Europe. With such privacy-friendly alternatives, respect for your data and the protection of your privacy come first. This allows you to use AI with peace of mind, without fearing automatic data leaks or unnoticed training runs.

Secure Alternatives for Your Everyday Life

To protect your identity and personal data, switching to tools that respect your privacy is key. Here is your roadmap to greater digital sovereignty:

1. Secure, Privacy-Friendly Browsers

Your browser is the window to the internet and often the most effective surveillance tool. A simple and effective first step is switching to privacy-friendly alternatives like Firefox, LibreWolf, or Brave. Brave, in particular, blocks trackers and ads by default, which not only protects your privacy but also makes websites load noticeably faster. If you prefer European browsers, the Zen Browser (from Spain) or Vivaldi (from Norway) are excellent options.

Why AI is a problem here: Many modern default browsers are increasingly integrating AI assistants (like Copilot in Edge) that can potentially analyze your entire browsing history, open tabs, and read content, sending it to cloud servers to generate summaries or translations. This severely compromises your anonymity while browsing.

2. Search Engines That Don’t Build Profiles

When searching the web, it’s equally important to rely on tools that don’t create profiles about you. Two good options from Europe are Qwant (France) and xPrivo Search (Luxembourg), which deliver excellent search results without storing your queries or building profiles. DuckDuckGo is also a user-friendly and secure everyday option, although it relies on Microsoft Bing’s search index in the background.

Why AI is a problem here: Major search engines use AI models to deeply analyze search behavior and create hyper-personalized profiles. Furthermore, your search queries are often used directly as training data for large language models (LLMs), meaning sensitive or personal search terms can feed into the AI’s knowledge base.

3. Confidential Communication via Email and Messenger

Your email inbox is probably the most sensitive digital archive you own. Providers like Tuta explicitly promise not to analyze content for AI training or advertising purposes. Additionally, Tuta offers end-to-end encryption, meaning not even the provider can read the contents of your emails. This guarantees 100% that no sensitive data will be misused to train AI models.

For quick smartphone communication, Olvid is an excellent choice. This highly secure messenger offers strict end-to-end encryption and doesn’t even require a phone number to register.

Note for Gmail users: Many people still use Gmail. Here too, Google analyzes your emails by default for “smart features” like Smart Compose, automated replies, or Gemini summaries. If you want to continue using Gmail but stop your data from being read for these AI features, you can disable them in the settings:

1. Open Gmail in your browser, click the gear icon in the top right corner, then select See all settings.
2. Under the General tab, scroll down to the Smart features and personalization section.
3. Uncheck the box for these features. (Tip: Also uncheck the box directly below it for Smart features and personalization in other Google products).
4. Click Save Changes at the very bottom. Note that this will also disable convenience features like automatic email sorting or Smart Reply.

Why AI is a problem here: In unencrypted emails and messengers, AI algorithms can automatically read and analyze your private conversations, invoices, medical documents, and personal preferences to generate “smart replies” or train their own systems—a massive violation of correspondence secrecy.

4. Private Storage for Photos and Files

Millions of people use services like Google Photos. Zeitkapsl from Austria is an excellent, secure replacement for Apple iCloud or Google Photos. When it comes to pure, secure file hosting, Filen.io is a very good European alternative that reliably protects your documents with end-to-end encryption.

Why AI is a problem here: AI-powered facial recognition, object detection, and automated album creation by major providers only work because all your private images are continuously scanned and analyzed. Your most intimate photos and personal visual data thus flow directly into the analytics and potentially into the training of tech giants’ image recognition algorithms.

5. Document Collaboration, Video Calls, and Notes

For professional team collaboration or document management, you don’t have to rely on large, data-hungry corporations. Nextcloud and Nextcloud Talk are powerful, direct competitors to Microsoft 365. They enable secure document collaboration and protected video calls, as you can host the data on your own or trusted servers.

Additionally, countless personal and professional thoughts accumulate in note-taking apps. Use open-source applications like Joplin for your notes to keep important data securely stored locally or encrypted, safe from prying eyes.

Why AI is a problem here: With cloud office solutions from major providers (like Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini for Workspace), text documents, spreadsheets, notes, and even video conference transcripts are actively read and processed by the AI. Corporate secrets and private records thus enter the analytical cycle of AI models.

6. Mobile Operating Systems and Smart Hardware

Data protection begins with the choice of your smartphone and the operating system installed on it. To stop uncontrolled data leaks at the system level, you can switch to specialized mobile operating systems and hardware. Devices like the Volla Phone or the Fairphone, combined with Murena and the /e/OS operating system, offer a privacy-friendly foundation that gives you full control back over your mobile data.

The current trend among major manufacturers is particularly critical: For instance, Perplexity announced its partnership with Samsung in February 2026. This raises massive security and privacy concerns, as the Perplexity AI now gains deep, system-wide access to highly sensitive user data. As we detailed in this blog article, Perplexity isn’t exactly strict about data privacy anyway. Instead, the service acts much like a Trojan horse, exploiting users’ private data for its own purposes by default.

Why AI is a problem here: Modern standard operating systems integrate AI deeply into the system. The AI often runs constantly in the background, analyzing screen content, keystrokes, and cross-app user behavior. This creates an all-encompassing surveillance layer right on the device, going far beyond the collection of traditional telemetry data.

Maximum Control Through Self-Hosting

If you want to go a step further, self-hosting is an excellent method. Using open-source software like Nextcloud, you can run your own cloud storage for documents and collaboration on your own server or a rented one.

The decisive advantage is obvious: No third-party provider has access to your files. Even if it sounds technically intimidating at first, many providers like Hetzner or Strato offer affordable packages where Nextcloud is installed with just a few clicks. This way, you maintain absolute control over your data and can be certain that no AI will access, analyze, or misuse it for training purposes.

Conclusion: Independence is the New Standard and Protects You from AI Surveillance and AI Training

Artificial intelligence and digital services are not the enemy. However, your thoughts, ideas, and personal data are invaluable. Therefore, it is important to maintain control over them and know how to protect yourself. Consciously switching to privacy-friendly tools is your clear statement for digital freedom and security. By doing so, you give sophisticated AI surveillance and AI training no chance.