GoKawiilA recent study found that around a third of AI app users are having deeply personal conversations with the chatbots. Even if you’re not sharing your deepest fears with an AI app, your questions and conversations may still include a significant amount of personal data.
A separate Stanford study found that six leading US AI companies all feed user inputs back into their models for future training, potentially putting your privacy at risk. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take to manage this …
The AI privacy risks
A surprising number of people use AI chatbots as a substitute therapist. This can obviously lead to the sharing of extremely sensitive personal information. But even if we’re not doing this, our queries can often reveal personal data that we wouldn’t want to be leaked onto the internet.
This can happen indirectly because the standard conditions of AI apps typically give them the right to use our conversations as training data for future versions of the models. That then generates the risk that our own data could be included in responses to other similar queries in future.
The stakes are even higher now that many AI models allow us to upload documents for analysis. The contents of those documents could potentially also be used as training material.
Opting out of AI data collection
Fortunately, all major AI apps provide the ability to opt out of using your data as training material, and for most it’s both quick and easy to do.
Amazon Alexa
In the Alexa app on the iPhone, tap the three-bar menu option at the bottom of the screen and then Alexa Privacy. Scroll down to Manage Your Alexa Data and scroll down again to Help Improve Alexa. Toggle off Use of voice recordings.
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