Privacy · Surveillance · Digital civil liberties
You don’t have to accept being tracked as the cost of going online.
We’re a student club at Pitt. We cover the tools that protect you and the policies that let the tracking happen.
What this page can already see
You didn’t type any of this. Your browser handed it over on its own, and a site you log into gets far more. None of it leaves your browser here.
AI & your privacy
The AI you pick decides who can read what you type.
Type a line below the way you’d type it into an assistant. Watch where it ends up. Most keep it and train on it; a few never read it at all.
Most assistants
Kept on their servers, tied to your account, and used to train the next model.
0 characters stored · retained by default
On device or encrypted
Never leaves your machine, or is sealed before it’s sent. They see shape, never words.
0 sent · stays with you
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type here is sent anywhere.
Keeps it, trains on it
On by default. Turning it off means finding the setting first.
ChatGPT
Gemini
Meta AI
Grok
Copilot
DeepSeek
Can’t read it
Runs on your device, or encrypts your text before the company ever touches it.
Ollama
LM Studio
Jan
GPT4All
Proton Lumo
Apple PCC
What we recommend
The tools we hand people first
Checking your browser…
Your ISP logs every domain you visit. So does your DNS resolver, by default.
One reused password means one breach exposes every account you have.
SMS codes can be intercepted or SIM-swapped. They’re the weakest second factor.
Every real email address you give a site is a permanent data point that gets bought and sold.
Most email providers scan your inbox. Your provider controls your messages, not you.
iMessage, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs store metadata. Some store the messages themselves.
Every card payment is a permanent, searchable record of where you were and what you bought.
We take no money from anyone on this list.
Full toolkit — why we chose each one →Surveillance accountability
You’re on camera crossing campus. Ask whether any of it is facial recognition, and Pitt doesn’t have to tell you.
Pitt publishes a camera policy and keeps footage about a month — but on facial recognition it has said nothing. As a state-related university it’s largely exempt from Pennsylvania’s open-records law, so a request a fully public school would have to answer, Pitt can decline. We didn’t ask the schools anything — you can’t make most of them answer. We took six plain questions any student might have and filled them in from the public record: what each school publishes, and on-the-record reporting where it doesn’t. One of those six decides all the rest.
On that one, four of Pennsylvania’s state-related schools stand behind the same exemption. The two fully public schools don’t get to.
Can a public-records request compel an answer?
Checked Jul 10, 2026Judged on whether you can get an answer — not on how much surveillance a campus runs. Every filled answer traces to what the school itself publishes.
Get involved
It’s free, open to everyone at Pitt, and joining takes about a minute.
No dues, no experience needed. Come to a meeting, or leave your name and we’ll tell you when the next one is.