Turn Off Location Sharing in the Assistant

Hanbyeol

I think the current system prompt includes something that tells the model the user's current location and time zone based on the user's IP address.

While I agree that some questions need to consider the user's location (e.g., "What's the weather?", "Tell me news near me"), Kagi has just over 50,000 users. If a user is in a small city or town, there might be a risk that the upstream provider could figure out who they are.
(Also some OpenAI models have potential long-term logging issues because of lawsuits.)

Kagi Assistant knows the user's location in the thinking process

I think an optional "disable location sharing" setting would be helpful for some people (for example via slash commands which are currently WIP).

Hanbyeol

To be clear, I am okay with something like "The user is in [city name] (in this case Seoul)."

What worries me is that district-level information is also sent to the model. I wonder if the provider can identify the user if the user adds their own custom prompt along with the system prompt.

(But the district name doesn't always seem to be correct, possibly because I mostly use cellular data.)

boon

We are going to disable that by default until we add an option to disable it.

fxgn

boon providing irrelevant data in the system promt really confused LLMs (@igakagi gave a good example). I think this should be implemented as an opt-in tool so that the model can fetch the location only if it's needed for the user's query. Maybe it would even be a good idea to limit it to Ki assistants.

RoxyRoxyRoxy

Just to clarify @boon's response above, this was something briefly enabled, we haven't been sharing your location this entire time 🙂

igakagi

Agree that having this always-on isn't great.
For example I found that with creative writing prompts, all of a sudden it started trying to work local landmarks into the plot. Which is fun if that's what you want, but in this case it wasn't.

Hanbyeol

fxgn

Yep, I read that the team's looking to add it as an opt-in. This was also discussed on Discord.
I'll leave a screenshot for anyone who hasn't joined Discord.

Discord chat

(Please note the timezone difference: It was Thursday 1:21 PM US Pacific / 8:21 PM UTC)