Published on October 10, 2025 11:20 AM GMTHere’s some things to keep in mind as we’re going into the glorious future:
It’s not clear that you can meaningfully delete the contents of your past chats with chatbots. There’s a good chance they’ll stick around in datacenters somewhere, no matter what you do.
Your chat logs might end up used for training AIs, leading to risks of someone down the line eliciting your private information by chatting with the AI.
More nefariously, your chat logs can be provided to AIs as context. Imagine this business model: a company doesn’t disclose your chat logs, but provides them as context to a bot, and sells influence-on-you-as-a-service. It could be used to target ads to you, politically manipulate you or scam you, whatever the highest bidder wants.
Conversations with chatbots are only half of the story. If you’ve talked to people through centralized services, these services could someday in the future get greedy and sell the chat logs, with you being none the wiser.
Even if AI companies keep their hands clean, these bad things can still be done by any third party that has access to some data about you. And every such third party now has an added incentive to sell that data. The attack surface is very large.
The chances of all above increase steeply as the industry gets more desperate for revenue, which is happening right now.
Is there anything you can personally do to avoid these dangers? I don’t think so. Your data is already out there, and you’re just one person, faced with an entire industry trying to make money on you. The only way to solve this is by some serious government regulation and enforcement, and the best way for a private person to help is by pushing toward that.
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