For many people, especially within the 2SLGBTQ+ community, it is crucial to be considerate with their personal data.

One of the best ways to practice data privacy is to share as little personal information as possible. Always keep in mind: the more information you disclose about yourself, the more visible you become to your counterpart. This applies just as much online as it does in person. But when it comes to the little data you share with organizations using AI, how do they ensure the safety of your data?

ProudZone is such an organization. Our users might share unique thoughts, experiences, and content on ProudZone—things they might not feel comfortable sharing anywhere else.

This in mind, as we explore the integration of AI into ProudZone, we ask ourselves an important question that many platforms often overlook: Should we route our community’s data through third-party AI cloud services?

Using third-party AI providers means routing data through other people’s systems and into their databases to train the model. This feels fundamentally at odds with everything we are building toward.

This leads us to a substantial decision. We are committed to investing in on-premises AI infrastructure when it comes to the core ProudZone ecosystem. That includes technology development, platform maintenance, and everything user-related.

To be transparent, we most likely will still use third-party AI solutions for our work – checking grammar, doing research, and so on – but not within the actual ProudZone ecosystem and only used carefully.

By doing so, we ensure that sensitive data and information remains with us, under our control.

This commitment not only enhances the security of our users’ data but also aligns with our vision for ProudZone.

An additional advantage we see in building our in-house privacy-first AI infrastructure is a more economical one. We are confident that this will make us more independent from market pricing and vendor consolidation.

Still in the evaluation phase, we are actively testing various hardware options and architectures that can support our goals reliably and affordably. We are dedicated to laying a solid foundation for the AI capabilities of ProudZone.

If we are asking our users to trust us, we need to be able to look them in the eye and confidently affirm that their data is as secure and under our control as possible.

AI, when used wisely as a tool, presents an opportunity to improve performance. But not at the expense of our users’ privacy.

We’ll be posting regular updates on our findings about our privacy-first AI infrastructure. To make sure you don’t miss anything, check our blog from time to time or simply subscribe to our email updates using the form below.