ChatGPT chats are not private anymore: OpenAI’s court order explained

A federal court in the United States has issued a protective order that requires OpenAI to indefinitely preserve all conversations from its ChatGPT platform. This order stems from a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other news organisations.

The New York Times and other publishers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft. They claim that ChatGPT was trained on their copyrighted content and can, in some cases, reproduce their articles, which allegedly allows users to bypass their paywalls and access content for free.

The publishers asked the court to prevent OpenAI from deleting any chat logs. They argued that these logs might contain evidence of users asking ChatGPT to generate content that infringes on copyright.

As a result of the court’s order, OpenAI is now required to keep a permanent record of all conversations from users in the US, including those that would normally be deleted by the user or automatically after a certain period.

OpenAI has opposed this order, stating that it compromises their commitment to user privacy. They argue that the order is overly broad and places a significant burden on the company.

In their objection to the order, OpenAI stated that they are “forced to jettison its commitment to allow users to control when and how their ChatGPT conversation data is used, and whether it is retained.”

This order applies to the users of the Free, Plus, Pro, and Team versions of ChatGPT. It does not apply to Enterprise or Edu users, who have different data retention policies.

The order mandates that OpenAI “preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going-forward basis until further order of the court.”

This means all conversations, even those a user deletes, are being saved.

The court order is a significant concern for user privacy. Many people share sensitive or personal information with ChatGPT, assuming those conversations will be private and eventually deleted. The order overrides this expectation.

Is ChatGPT actually private?

ChatGPT is not a private service. Conversations are not publicly visible; however, OpenAI collects and uses the data from your interactions for various purposes, including training its models and improving its services.