A Handy Cheat Sheet For Those That Never Asked For This

Chatbots, AI Assistants and LLM enhanced apps are all the rage now, whether you like it or not.  If you do enjoy the suggestions Google search now provides or Copilot’s suggestions then you have nothing to worry about unless you use Apple.  While Google, Meta and Microsoft all enable their AI enhancements automatically, Apple Intelligence is alone in requiring you to opt-in.  It will be quite easy to do, but Apple should be help up as the model for AI Assistant implementation; it should be a choice and not something thrust upon you and your personal data.

While Apple is the gold standard, Meta is the benchmark for awfulness.  Meta AI has appeared on Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and cannot be disabled, you can’t even stop it from harvesting your personal data unless the country you live in has strong legal protections against such practices, such as the GPDR in the EU.  Those lucky enough to live in such places can check under Settings -> About -> Privacy policy to discover how to opt out; expect the process to change as frequently as Meta’s other privacy features though.  For the rest of us, a visit to Help Center on Facebook will allow us to request they delete data used by third parties to develop its AI.

If you are getting annoyed by Google’s AI Overviews feature you can’t stop it from immediately appearing but if you click the Web tab immediately after the search results load you will see Google results without the added glue loving LLM.  Of course Alphabet still happily hoards all your search data, but a visit to myactivity.google.com will let yo toggle off their tracking of Web and app activity.  If you fire up their Gemini chatbot, which you need to do manually, you can suppress it’s ability to store your data by visiting myactivity.google.com/product/gemini.

Last, but not least in it’s desire to thrust LLM enhanced search and data collection is Microsoft.  If you are running a current version of Windows you have been gifted with Copilot, however it doesn’t actually do anything until you click that rainbow button.  Once you do all bets are off, but you can visit copilot.microsoft.com turn off Model training in the Privacy tab.  You can get rid of the button altogether if you open edge://settings, find Sidebar, followed by App and notification settings and, finally, Copilot.  Toggle off the Copilot setting to banish the button.

However, there is another Microsoft product which has opted you into being a training model for their LLM.  Anything you post on LinkedIn, be it comments or your resume, will be used as training data and there is no way to stop it.