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3 Privacy-focused AI no-code tools I use every day

Piotrek Bodera

• 4 min read
3 Privacy-focused AI no-code tools I use every day

Privacy isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a survival skill for digital nomads like us who navigate an increasingly intrusive online world. From search engines to AI assistants, everything we use collects breadcrumbs of our lives, building profiles that often feel unsettlingly personal. That’s why I’ve curated a suite of privacy-focused, no-code AI tools that respect my data while enhancing my workflow.

Why is AI privacy important for digital nomads?

As mentioned in SimpleLogin article, digital nomads operate in a complex legal framework. We need to proactively secure our data, and minimize profiling of our digital presence.

Google used to be the main surveillance capitalist, due to the popularity of their search engine. But now the behavior of Internet users, including digital nomads, is changing. We dump all possible tasks, assignments, text generations and sensitive information to an AI assistant.

In short, we are giving an AI not only our search intents. We also share what we do, what we work on, what we desire. All of this is used to train the AI models and build our online profiles.

Brave Search with AI Summary

As a part of DeGoogling my digital life, I’ve been using Ecosia for a few years. However, their dependency on Bing means lower quality search results, and outages. Like the one happened in May 2024. Since then, I switched fully to Brave Search, and couldn’t be more satisfied.

Especially, when they introduced their own AI summary with global availability long before Google. Indeed, now all search engines offer some AI capabilities, but Brave does it in a privacy preserving way. Their approach is to use open-source models like Llama, Mistral, Mixtral and CodeLLM.

Thanks to the above AI mix and Brave’s own search index, the result is spectacular. In 95% of cases, I get the correct answer in the AI summary. Moreover, I can ask additional questions to the search query via the built-in ephemeral conversation mode.

Leo the universal AI assistant in Brave Browser

Indeed, the ability to converse with the all-knowing always available assistant, is the selling point of the AI. And “Leo” is the built-in AI assistant in Brave. Or more specifically, it’s a chat interface with switchable models.

Leo is free with optional premium plan. However, for me, the Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) is the killer feature. With it, I run the local version of Llama 3 and DeepSeek R1. Playing with the concept of truly private, cost free, and offline AI assistant.

Moreover, the BYOM also supports API access to online models. Therefore, whenever necessary, I use OpenAI services but only pay for the actual usage. Such a solution is way cheaper than their $20 monthly subscription.

Perplexity PRO – not privacy-centric but useful for deep research

While the two tools above cover most of my everyday needs, I started to use Perplexity for more thorough research. Since the end of 2024 the PRO subscription is included in my Revolut Premium plan. Which means that without extra costs I can play with wide selection of Perplexity PRO offering.

At the time of publishing this post I have access to models:

  • DeepSeek R1 hosted in the US (so it’s without censorship)
  • OpenAI O3 Mini
  • Sonar – Perplexity’s own model
  • Claude 3.5 from Anthropic
  • GPT-4o – OpenAI most popular model used in ChatGPT
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash – Google’s model
  • Grok-2 – model from xAI

For image generation:

  • Playground v3
  • DALL-E 3 – OpenAI model
  • FLUX.1 – by far the most effective model from Black Forest Labs

The models often change and without prior notice. Most recently, Perplexity PRO offered the OpenAI o1 full model with a cap of 10 uses per day. Now, it has been replaced by o3-mini, but without the daily cap.

Nevertheless, Perplexity is much like Leo. A universal AI tool with easily swappable models. The PRO plan provides access to commercial AIs from many providers. And that is a great option, for someone like me, who wants to play around, compare the outputs, and choose a model based on the quality of the response.

To preserve privacy, I created a unique email alias for my Perplexity account, opted-out from data retention and I do pick my queries carefully, knowing it’s they are transmitted to third parties.

Summary

In today’s AI-driven digital landscape, privacy has become crucial for digital nomads like myself who are conscious about data protection. These tools form my daily arsenal for maintaining digital privacy while leveraging AI capabilities.