Item — HN Reader

I have not run OpenClaw and similar frameworks because of security concerns, but I enjoy the author's success, good for him.

There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and *maybe* Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.

I am for local compute, private data, etc., but for my personal AI assistant I want something so bullet proof that I lose not a minute of sleep worrying about by data. I don't want to run the infrastructure myself, but a hybrid solution would also be good.

11 comments

AMEX, Capital One and Apple are not even close to the top of the list of companies that I would trust with my digital data.

Never mind the list of companies - I'd be very curious to know what the 'trust signals' are that would help you trust a company?

For hardware, I'd only trust a company if they didn't also have an interest in data. In fact, I'd trust a hardware company more if they didn't also have a big software division.

A company like AMD I would trust more than a company like Apple.

Decent management. A lack of change of business model, no rug pulls and such. Fair value for money. Consistency over the longer term. No lock in or other forced relationships. Large enough to be useful and to have decent team size, small enough to not have the illusion they'll conquer the world. Healthy competition.

Admirable, but short of a local credit union I used to use (which I am no longer with as they f'd up a rather critical transaction), I can scarcely imagine a business that fits such a model these days. The amount of transparency needed to vet this would be interesting to find though, and its mere presence probably a green flag.

It's much easier to use this to reject than to accept.

Are there any companies existing you would trust?

I honestly can’t name a single one I know of who could pass that criteria

Edit:found your other comment answering a similar question

the way they respond to security and privacy incidents + publishing technical security + privacy papers / docs

Apple = Run more commercials with black backgrounds and white text that says

SECURITY

PRIVACY

---

Heyyy it never said "good privacy" perceive as you want...

Don't publicly acknowledge that you were the reason someone got murdered and 1000 VIPs got hacked.

One day when I'm deemed a 'Baddie', I looked at Apple as inspiration.

Good one, yes, that is important.

And do they approach Security as a Feature or as a Process. The fingers on one hand are enough to count them...

No past history of shady planned-obsolescence sprinkled in a bunch of their products, for one.

So that rules out Apple.

A leadership team that is very open and involved with the community, and one that takes extra steps, compared to competitors, to show they take privacy seriously.

Planned obsolescence tells me they don't make money on the daily use of their software and they need me to buy more hardware in order to make money.

I'd go for a co-operative ownership model rather than capitalist?

and make sure the member/owners are all of like mind, and willing to pay more to ensure security and privacy

Co-operative will have significantly worse privacy guarantee compared to shareholder based model. In the no one company wants to sacrifice on privacy standard just for the sake of it. They do it for money. And in shareholder based model, the employees are more likely to go against the shareholder when user privacy is involved, because they are not directly benefiting from it.

That's nonsense. Shareholders have an incentive to violate privacy much stronger than any one employee: they can sell their shares to the highest bidder and walk away with 'clean hands' (or so they'll argue) whereas co-op partners violating your privacy would have to do so on their own title with immediate liability for their person.

Mondragon for IT... it's been my dream for decades.

Jacques, do you mind sharing your list of trusted companies? Thanks in advance.

It's going to be pretty short. Proton would be there for comms, for hosting related stuff I would trust Hetzner before any big US based cloud company. For the AI domain I wouldn't trust any of the big players, they're all just jockeying for position and want to achieve lock-in on a scale never seen before and they have all already shown they don't give a rats ass about where they get their training data and I expect that once they are in financial trouble they'll be happy to sell your private data down the river.

Effectively you can trust all of the companies out there right up until they are acquired and then you will regret all of the data you ever gave them. In that sense Facebook is unique: it was rotten from day #1.

Vehicles: anything made before 2005, SIM or e-SIM on board = no go.

I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now. Unfortunately you are now more or less forced to participate because your bank, your government and your social circle will push you back in. And I'm still pissed off that I'm not allowed to host any servers on a residential connection. That's not 'internet connectivity' that's 'consumer connectivity'.

> I'm halfway towards setting up my own private mail server and IRC server for me and my friends and kissing the internet goodbye. It was a fun 30 years but we're well into nightmare territory now.

Every day my doomer sentiment deepens, and I am ashamed when I come onto here and see all this optimism. It is refreshing to see people whose opinions I have come to respect on this forum to be as negative as I am.

Proton is quite a privacy washing front. Surprised than even in HN nobody check behind the facade what was signed.

It's all so tiring isn't it? It's become a meme, but everyday more and more, I yearn for living in the middle of nowhere, unplugged, with just my friends and family around. Very unrealistic, but still.

why the (e)SIM cars concern? i ask since the data transmission (bidirectional) can be used to justify lower insurance rates, for an example, than without that data.

( https://www.lemonade.com/fsd is an example )

Proton? After the last two years of enshitification and purely revenue driven product decisions really?

Mark, can you conceive that some people don’t trust any companies?

Yes, I can!

After reading Jacques's response to my question, my list got smaller. Personally, I still like Proton, but I get that they have made some people unhappy. I also agree that Hetzner is a reliable provider; I have used them a bunch of times in the last ten years.

Then my friend, we have to worry about fiber/network providers I suppose.

This general topic is outside my primary area of competence, so I just have a loose opinion of maintaining my own domain, use encryption, and being able switch between providers easily.

I would love to see an Ask HN on secure and private agentic infra + frameworks.

I’d be very curious what your list would be

See other comment.

> There are very few companies who I trust with my digital data and thus trust to host something like OpenClaw and run it on my behalf: American Express, Capital One, maybe Proton, and maybe Apple. I managed an AI lab team at Capital One and personally I trust them.

I don't really understand what this has to do with the post or even OpenClaw. The big draw of OpenClaw (as I understand it) was that you could run it locally on your own system. Supposedly, per this post, OpenClaw is moving to a foundation and they've committed to letting the author continue working on it while on the OpenAI payroll. I doubt that, but it's a sign that they're making it explicitly not an OpenAI product.

OpenClaw's success and resulting PR hype explosion came from ignoring all of the trust and security guardrails that any big company would have to abide by. It would be a disaster of the highest order if it had been associated with any big company from the start. Because it felt like a grassroots experiment all of the extreme security problems were shifted to the users' responsibility.

It's going to be interesting to see where it goes from here. This blog post is already hinting that they're putting OpenClaw at arm's length by putting it into a foundation.

Prepare for the rug pull...

a tale as old as time ...

Privacy aside, you can never trust an LLM with your data and trust it to do exactly what it was instructed to do.

You raised a good point I am now personally basically expecting to see this year ( next at the latest ). Some brave corporate will decide for millions of users to, uhh, liberate all users data. My money is not of that happening at Googles or OpenAIs of the world though. I am predicting it will be either be a bank or one of the data brokers.

With any luck, maybe this will finally be a bridge too fast, like what Amazon's superbowl ad did for surveillance conversation.

Sorry to break it to you but I would not trust any financial companies with my personal data. Simply because I’ve seen how they use data to build exploitive products in the past.

Quick plus one for Capital One after also working there. They're by far the most tech-forward of all the larger financial institutions, and by virtue of being a FI they take data-security much more seriously than any other "tech" companies.

No this is not a paid post lol

Not a paid post but a bunch of generalities with no specifics. C1 is by far the worse of the bunch in the banking sector. C1 now openly engages in stack ranking and has absolutely destroyed employee morale, all due to hiring ex Amazon directors.

For any future workers, be highly forewarned that if ex Amazon leadership enters your company their number one goal becomes inducing mass misery to magically raise the share price. It'll never work because they are coming from a company that has a massive unregulated monopoly (or oligopoly if you want to be technical) that is able to subsidize poor business ideas indefinitely. They mistake working in this environment as having competence so be warned: they will fuck everything up, collect massive bonuses, and you'll be collecting unemployment soon enough under their guidance.

>Apple

Lol

Their marketing team got ya.

I aspire to be as good as Apple at marketing. Who knew 2nd or worse place in everything doesnt matter when you are #1 in marketing?

is this marketing or is just relating what they did to keep things secure?

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Didn't have to click the link. Words don't matter. The fact that their phone security was poor enough for someone to get killed and thousands of others exposed... Oh and PRISM, so...

Marketing.

Sorry to pile on, but Capital One is an insane name to drop there.

You really trust them?

My trust does not extend that far.

Well it’s not even just data, you have to trust actions taken if you want the assist to, you know, assist. I have been yoloing it and really enjoying it. Albeit from a locked off server.

sorry to say it, but C1 LOL. they don’t care at all about privacy! Don’t mistake your team for the company values.