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Is Ollama the most private/secure way to run AI models locally? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I'm currently running Deepseek on Linux with Ollama (installed via curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh), and I specifically have to run it on my personal file server because it's the only computer in the house with enough memory for the larger models. Since it's running on the same system that has direct access to all my files, I'm more concerned about security than I would be if it was running on a dedicated server that just does AI. I'm really not knowledgeable on how AI actually works at the execution level, and I just wanted to ask whether Ollama is actually private and secure. I'm assuming it doesn't send my prompts anywhere since everything I've read lists that as the biggest advantage, but how exactly is the AI being executed on the system when you give it a command like ollama run deepseek-r1:32b and have it download files from where it's downloading from by default? Is it just downloading a regular executable and running that on the system, or is it more sandboxed than that? Is it possible for a malicious AI model to scan my files or do other things on the computer?

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[–] movies@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

Nah, you’re safe to run it locally. You’re downloading the specific model, that’s right, and it’s not an exe. As you ask questions of it, the inference step, that is sent directly to the model on your machine by the ollama interface. Nothing goes over the network after you download a model and there is no scanning involved; that’s just not how it works.