“People talk about the most personal details in their lives to ChatGPT. People use it, young people, especially, use it as a therapist, a life coach; having these relationship problems and [asking] ‘what should I do?’ And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it. There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality, whatever. And we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT,” Altman said.
Further, Altman said that this lack of protection could have serious consequences. In legal situations, user conversations with ChatGPT could be subpoenaed and used in court. “If someone confides their most personal issues to ChatGPT, and that ends up in legal proceedings, we could be compelled to hand that over. And that’s a real problem,” he warned.Unlike encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp or Signal, which ensure messages remain private between sender and receiver, ChatGPT conversations are not end-to-end encrypted.
OpenAI retains the ability to access and review those chats, which are sometimes used for improving the model and preventing misuse.
While OpenAI claims that it deletes free-tier user chats within 30 days, exceptions exist for legal and security reasons. The issue of data retention has come under increased scrutiny recently, especially in light of ongoing legal battles.
One such case is a lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging unauthorised use of millions of its articles to train ChatGPT. In that case, a court has ordered OpenAI to preserve all related chat data, conflicting with the company’s standard data deletion policies.
In response, OpenAI has pushed back. “We will fight any demand that compromises our users’ privacy; this is a core principle,” Altman wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
