You're talking about privacy from governments, which I agree os an overblown concern unless you're some sort of political activist/dissident.
However, privacy from mega corpos is an entirely different matter, because they CARE about you(r data) and rather than a pixel, you're a fully fleshed out record in their gigantic databases and they use this data to profit off of you, in multiple ways that all can be described as "scamming you out of money" by way 0f perfecting the art of selling you shit you don't need.
And then you have the wannabes, mid-sized corpos with security postures so poor every hacker and their grandmother has your data, for the sole purpose of scamming your own grandmother.
It works ok and good by default. You start using it as if you'd Claude or Codex, the when you find yourself missing a feature, you get an extension for it or you ask an agent to make it.
For example, I started using it, wanted a plan mode, downloaded an extension for it. Wanted to be able to analyze token usage for turn in a session, I had an agent create an extension for that. Then I wanted a custom status bar, so I had an agent implement an extension for that.
Symlink the .pi directory to the profile you want, swapping changes the target of the link inste of modifying files. This is how I implement dark/light mode autoswitches on some of the cli tools I use.
They train. Deepseek doesn't have a Zero Data Retention policy, but for many personal tasks I'm (not parent) ok with them having this data if it means better, cheaper models for everyone on the future.
Different story with $DAYJOB where ZDR matters, but the beauty of open models is that you can find a provider hosting them in your preferred terms.
However, privacy from mega corpos is an entirely different matter, because they CARE about you(r data) and rather than a pixel, you're a fully fleshed out record in their gigantic databases and they use this data to profit off of you, in multiple ways that all can be described as "scamming you out of money" by way 0f perfecting the art of selling you shit you don't need.
And then you have the wannabes, mid-sized corpos with security postures so poor every hacker and their grandmother has your data, for the sole purpose of scamming your own grandmother.
reply