I bullied Ellipsus, the “anti-AI” writing tool, into a better privacy policy
I’ve been searching for a solution to replace Ulysses as my writing app. Ulysses is wonderful but has some major bugs that have existed for too long to ignore.
In my search for something new, Ellipsus kept getting recommended as an “anti-AI” writing tool and I got curious.
Ellipsus certainly says the right things. However, companies like Google and OpenAI say they care about privacy as well, and obviously don’t.
Sure enough, I looked at Ellipsus’ privacy policy and in no way did it protect against training their own AI models.
But I believe we need to be the change we want to see in the world, so I decided to bully them into a better privacy policy.
And it worked! I am proud to say that as of today, Ellipsus’ Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions now explicitly state they do not use your data to train any AI models.1
Other concerns
I still have qualms with using Ellipsus. They are funded by Gaingels and Common Magic, two venture funds who almost-exclusively fund AI companies.
Ellipsus’ data would be the perfect data set for training an AI model. And with no business model, it seems like something they’d pursue. But now at least their privacy policy bans this sort of training (in theory).
Ellipsus is also not encrypted and it’s unclear who their third party vendors are.2 Other collaborative software like Outline and Proton Docs have neither of these issues.3
With that said, I am very happy with how receptive Ellipsus was to my requests. And it makes me think we need to proactively bully more companies like this.
Their response: “both pages have been amended to make that explicitly clear; thanks for bringing our attention to it!"↩
Ellipsus tells me E2EE is on their roadmap. Though they also say it will be a paid feature. That will help with their lack of business model, but I fear pay-walling this type of feature will create an incentive where you need to pay to be private.↩
Both also have sustainable business models. And the latter of which is also open source. I will note that Outline is closer to a notion replacement, but I love what they’re doing and they deserve a shoutout.↩