It's hard to draw a reasonable balance between acquiring information and giving information.

In my case, while I have a Facebook account, I almost never log onto it (and always log out when I'm done). Facebook has never had my photo (though I suspect some bored relatives may have flagged me in theirs). I have never tweeted or posted pics. On my PC, I regularly use VPN's the Tor Onion browser as well as two different software products to do sweeps of my system (besides the anti-virus and firewall stuff). I regularly empty my internet cache/cookies/history and frequently use incognito mode.

That said, I have been frequenting the "dark side" and using multiple AI's to solve each problem to see which does the best job. Some seem to have memories of past queries and sometimes conflate two issues together (like the cabling to my new PC power supply to allow me to better write travel guides). One AI shortened the advice of another from 14 pages to four about an IT procedure I am going to undertake. So, they are finding out more about me as they are attempting to assist me with technical issues. None have been perfect and the process of using more than one has proved fruitful, though flagging how incomplete the data they are presenting can sometimes be.

On a side note, I figured it was time to change my wife's laptop. Her current one was fine (though long in the tooth), but I was attracted by a Black Friday sale of a new-fangled Acer with built-in "Copilot+" - which turned out to be a dedicated key on the keyboard to pull up Microsoft's AI. Now, to be clear, this is one of the ones I use on my PC anyway, but I guess it is worth money to them (as in savings to the end user on the price) to try to promote their particular AI flavor.

I haven't mentioned the key to her and she hasn't noticed it.

Jeff