Almost Nobody Bothers About Privacy
Call Copilot has a local mode: recognition runs right in the browser and the audio never leaves the device. A handful of people switch it on, nearly all of them in the EU. The privacy bet hasn't paid off.
By Georg Malahov
Call Copilot has a local mode — the Gemini Nano model runs right in the browser, and the audio never leaves the device. I built it back in October, when I was picking what to differentiate on.
Ten months on, the picture is this: only a handful of people switch it on. Nearly all of them are in the EU, most often Germany. I hear the same thing in person — when I describe the product face to face, this is the feature people catch on — but conversations with people I know don't count as demand.
The conclusion runs opposite to what I was counting on, and it is about my users rather than the market at large: almost nobody bothers about privacy. The bet hasn't paid off — at least not with the audience that reaches me.
I'm keeping the mode anyway: it costs me nothing to maintain, and the share of people who turn it on is the one number that will tell me the audience has changed.