What happens to the secrets you share with AI

The big picture: In the first installment of Axios' "What they know about you" series, published in 2019, we examined the information major tech companies collected about their users. In 2024, we followed up with a look at what consumer data AI companies use to train their systems.

• This new series revisits those questions — and widens the lens. We'll examine not only whether a company uses consumer data to train future AI models, but also how it can use that data now: to personalize responses, retain a memory, recommend content or target advertising.

Driving the news: AI companies are seeking access to data beyond the chat window.

• OpenAI last week announced an optional Computer History feature that lets ChatGPT retain a record of the apps and websites a person uses.
• Google, meanwhile, said last month it will use photos and other material people upload through Search to train its AI systems by default, though users can opt out.
• The upside is the potential for more useful, personalized AI. The tradeoff is giving companies a broader and more continuous view of users' lives.

Between the lines: Chatbots can invite a kind of disclosure that search engines and social networks often do not.

• People use them to ask about health, money, work and relationships — potentially creating a more intimate record of their concerns.
• Meta, Google and OpenAI are all exploring different approaches to advertising on their chatbots.
• If consumer AI follows the path of search and social media, advertising could become a far more significant part of the business — creating an incentive for chatbot makers to increase engagement.

What they're saying: "The AI era will increasingly be fueled by people voluntarily handing over their full digital lives to AI tools that promise to relieve their mental load or loneliness," Miranda Bogen, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told Axios.

• "The more a system knows about you, the easier it will be to make escalating requests for private details in a way that feels natural," Bogen said. "Without robust privacy protections, the incentive to monetize that knowledge will be hard to resist."

Zoom in: Company policies vary considerably. Apple, for example, offers the most private option with Apple Intelligence requests on a user's device.

• It handles the requests it can on-device. For more demanding tasks, Apple uses Private Cloud Compute, a system it says uses data only to fulfill the request and does not make that content accessible to Apple.
• That approach can limit how much of a user's history Apple can retain and use for ongoing personalization.

• It does not apply when a user chooses to send a request to a third-party service, such as ChatGPT.

Meta, by contrast, stakes a far broader claim to user data in its privacy policy.

• The company says it can use interactions with Meta AI to personalize content and ads across its services, including some interactions through its smart glasses.
• Meta also says it does not use conversations about certain sensitive topics — including health, politics and religion — to personalize ads.
• It has also begun rolling out an "Incognito Chat" mode for temporary, private Meta AI conversations. This system is designed to work similar to Apple's in which Meta's servers see the query only to provide an answer with no data stored.

Zoom out: Other AI services fall somewhere between Apple's device-centered approach and Meta's broader data-use policies.

• Some offer temporary chats that are not used for memory or model training.
• There are services that only train on user data if users give permission while others require a person to opt out to avoid having their data used for training.
• Many services allow users to see the data that is stored and delete specific memories. Sometimes that's as easy as asking the chatbot not to remember a particular detail while others have more complex mechanisms for editing memories.
• And then some chatbots also have separate rules for health information, children's data or conversations shared with connected apps.

What we're watching: The key distinction is no longer whether a company trains on your prompts. It is whether those prompts can shape the system's understanding of you — and what else that understanding can be used to do.

Bottom line: The value of a personalized chatbot may be worth the privacy tradeoff for many people. But consumers deserve to understand the bargain before they start talking.