Balancing Privacy and Productivity

I build my digital life on two primary service providers:

• Proton: mail, cloud storage, and Lumo private LLM chat (integrated web search tool with a strong Mistral model: my default tool that replaces plain web searches as well as covering 90% of my routine ‘LLM chat’ use)

• Google: Gemini APIs, occasional use of Gemini for deep research, very occasional use of AntiGravity for coding using Claude and Gemini models, YouTube Plus for entertainment (philosophy talks, nature videos, Qi Gong exercise, etc. etc.)

I also use:

• DuckDuckGo: when I still do web search, DDG is my default.

Make your own decisions

While I argue that almost everyone should think more carefully what personal and business information they leak to thousands of companies that buy, sell, trade, and use your data - and what to do to minimize these oozing data leaks - the question of how to stay productive is probably more difficult for you, dear reader.

I am happily retired so I understand that my tool and infrastructure requirements are easier to reconcile with privacy concerns than those of my online friends who are reading this.