ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, both attracting users with its advanced capabilities and raising concern over potential disruption in various sectors. Yet there is another danger posed by this tool – a threat to our privacy. The language model upon which it relies demands massive amounts of data to function and improve its capacity for detecting patterns, predicting what will come next, and producing text which appears genuinely composed.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, fed it approximately 300 billion words culled from books, articles, websites and posts; their sourcing included personal information gathered without permission. Effectively, if you’ve ever written a blog post or product review, commented on an article online, or posted something similar – all of these could have been collected by ChatGPT.
Unfortunately, this trend raises issues of contextual integrity – a concept often discussed within legal debates about privacy. This principle implies that individuals’ information should not be made available outside the environment in which it was originally shared. What’s more, OpenAI hasn’t established any mechanisms enabling people to check if they feature in the company’s stored data, or to request its removal.
Source: ChatGPT is a data privacy nightmare. If you’ve ever posted online, you ought to be concerned
