Five things you should never reveal to ChatGPT if you want to protect your privacy

ChatGPT

People turn to ChatGPT for all kinds of things — couples therapy, help with writing a professional email, turning pictures of their dogs into humans — letting the artificial intelligence platform in on some personal information.

And apparently, there are a few specific things you should never share with the chatbot.

When you type something into a chatbot, “you lose possession of it,” Jennifer King, a fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, told the Wall Street Journal.

There are ways to protect your privacy when using an AI chatbot. Getty Images

“Please don’t share any sensitive information in your conversations,” OpenAI writes on their website, while Google urges Gemini users not to “…enter confidential information or any data you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see.”

On that note, here are the five things no one should tell ChatGPT or an AI chatbot.

ChatGPT has a “Temporary Chat” mode which acts in a similar manner to an internet browser’s incognito mode. CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Identity information

Don’t reveal any identifying information to ChatGPT. Information such as your Social Security number, driver’s license and passport numbers, as well as date of birth, address and phone numbers should never be shared.

Some chatbots work to redact them, but it’s safer to avoid sharing this information at all.

“We want our AI models to learn about the world, not private individuals, and we actively minimize the collection of personal information,” an OpenAI spokeswoman told WSJ.

Medical results

While the healthcare industry values confidentiality for patients to protect their personal information as well as discrimination, AI chatbots are not typically included in this special confidentiality protection.

If you feel the need to ask ChatGPT to interpret lab work or other medical results, King suggested cropping or editing the document before uploading it, keeping it “just to the test…

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