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If you're one of the 900 million people who reportedly use ChatGPT every week, the chatbot might be a staple of life. Maybe it helps you get work done or come up with meal plans. You might even consult it whenever you have a scuffle with a friend or family member.
But as you turn to ChatGPT for increasingly more in your life, you may want to re-evaluate how much personal information you're disclosing along the way. Ideally, you know not to disclose sensitive financial information -- but other details about you could also be worth shielding.
Also: I put GPT-5.5 through a 10-round test: It got a near-perfect score
(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.)
Privacy experts are already sounding the alarm about the potential harms of saying too much to your chatbot. The underlying concern is that no one is entirely sure how your personal information, whether sensitive or seemingly innocuous, could be used in the future. Some fear personal data could end up in a mass surveillance system or be used in other unforeseen ways that will ultimately harm or disadvantage you.
That ambiguity, they argue, is reason enough for caution.
Here are five ways you can better manage the amount of personal information ChatGPT has about you, if you're using a consumer account.
1. Opt out of training data
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