u/Conscious_Nobody9571

A class-action lawsuit filed this week in a San Francisco federal court claims Perplexity AI has been embedding hidden tracking scripts that send your conversations straight to Meta and Google's infrastructure. The trackers allegedly kick in the moment you log in, and they work even when you're browsing in Incognito mode.

The lead plaintiff is a guy from Utah who used Perplexity to ask about his family's tax situation, investment portfolios, and financial strategies. All of that, according to the complaint, was getting piped to Meta and Google in real time. Perplexity's spokesperson basically dodged, saying they haven't been served yet and can't verify any of the claims.

The irony is that a huge chunk of Perplexity's user base switched over specifically because Google felt too ad-driven and privacy-invasive. The whole pitch was clean AI search with no tracking. If these allegations hold up, Perplexity was doing the exact same thing, except the data it was sharing is way more personal because people talk to AI chatbots like they're talking to their accountant.

Nobody Googles their full tax situation with follow-up questions. But people absolutely dump entire financial scenarios, medical symptoms, legal questions into Perplexity, all in conversational detail with context from previous messages. If that data really was flowing to Meta and Google, it's a completely different category of privacy violation compared to regular web tracking.

Perplexity's also dealing with a separate Amazon lawsuit right now, so legally they're having a rough spring.

I'm curious where everyone's landing for private AI queries. Are people actually running local models for sensitive stuff, or have we all just accepted that nothing typed into a cloud service stays between you and the server?