We're in the same boat. I would rather have NO llm, than an llm that collects my data (which you should assume is all of them, unless you've been asleep for the last 20 years).

Fortunately, I don't have to pick one or the other - instead I run Qwen 3.6 35B A3B. It's a bit slow with my 8gb GPU (I'm in the process of getting a bigger one) but again, to me the choice isn't "what's the best I can get", it's "what's the best local I can get".