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Most generative AI companies rely on user data to train their chatbots. For that, they may turn to public or private data. Some services are less invasive and more flexible at scooping up data from their users. Others, not so much. A new report from data removal service Incogni looks at the best and the worst of AI when it comes to respecting your personal data and privacy.
For its report "Gen AI and LLM Data Privacy Ranking 2025," Incogni examined nine popular generative AI services and applied 11 different criteria to measure their data privacy practices. The criteria covered the following questions:
What data is used to train the models? Can user conversations be used to train the models? Can prompts be shared with non-service providers or other reasonable entities? Can the personal information from users be removed from the training dataset? How clear is it if prompts are used for training? How easy is it to find information on how models were trained? Is there a clear privacy policy for data collection? How readable is the privacy policy? Which sources are used to collect user data? Is the data shared with third parties? What data do the AI apps collect?
The providers and AIs included in the research were Mistral AI's Le Chat, OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok, Anthropic's Claude, Inflection AI's Pi, DeekSeek, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Meta AI. Each AI did well with some questions and not as well with others.
Also: Want AI to work for your business? Then privacy needs to come first
As one example, Grok earned a good grade for how clearly it conveys that prompts are used for training, but didn't do so well on the readability of its privacy policy. As another example, the grades given to ChatGPT and Gemini for their mobile app data collection differed quite a bit between the iOS and Android versions.
Across the group, however, Le Chat took top prize as the most privacy-friendly AI service. Though it lost a few points for transparency, it still fared well in that area. Plus, its data collection is limited, and it scored high points on other AI-specific privacy issues.
ChatGPT ranked second. Incogni researchers were slightly concerned with how OpenAI's models are trained and how user data interacts with the service. But ChatGPT clearly presents the company's privacy policies, lets you understand what happens with your data, and provides clear ways to limit the use of your data.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
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