i’ve always wondered how private chatgpt truly is, so i spent a few hours reading their privacy policy.

here's what I found:

1. your chats become content that openai can use: by default, your messages, uploads, and feedback are treated as “user content” and can be used to improve and train models, unless you turn this off in data controls or use certain business plans.

2. conversations (and lots of metadata) are stored by default: chatgpt saves your chats, plus account details and usage/technical data (ip, device info, timestamps, etc.) to run and improve the service. This is the default behavior for regular users

3. employees at openai or its vendors can review some data

content can be accessed by employees or service providers for safety checks, debugging, abuse detection, and other operational needs — so it is not something only “the model” ever sees

4. your data can be shared with third-party service providers

openai explicitly shares personal information with vendors like cloud hosts, analytics tools, and customer-support providers, who also process and store parts of your data under openai’s instructions

5. it can be handed over to governments or courts

openai’s policy allows sharing your data with law enforcement or other authorities when required by law or to protect its rights and systems. So legal requests can override your expectations of privacy.

6. deleted or “temporary” chats aren’t a hard privacy guarantee

under normal policy, deleted and temporary chats are supposed to be removed from openai’s systems after about 30 days, but legal orders (like the new york times lawsuit) have forced openai to retain even deleted chats for much longer / indefinitely for many users.

7. long-term “memory” stores facts about you

chatgpt now has a memory system that can remember things like where you live, preferences, and ongoing projects across chats, unless you turn this off or manually clear memories. That’s convenient, but it also means more persistent profiling of you on their servers

8. consumer vs enterprise: very different guarantees

enterprise / team / edu / some api customers get stricter protections (no training on their data, controlled retention, etc.). ordinary free/plus users don’t get that by default, so their experience is meaningfully less private

9. plugins/tools/browsing can expose even more

when you use web browsing, custom gpts, or tools that call out to other services, extra data (urls, document content, third-party site data) can flow through multiple systems, expanding the number of parties that see your activity beyond just openai.

if privacy matters to you, the safest approach is to run models locally. if you don’t have a gpu, use a privacy-focused platform like okara or lumo