“You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
By Joe Wilkins<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass \u2014 and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey<\/a> conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET<\/em><\/a>, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn\u2019t tell the \u201ctrusted people\u201d in their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That\u2019s according to new reporting by the Washington Post<\/em><\/a>, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even if your transcripts don\u2019t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you\u2019re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there\u2019s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo<\/em> notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats<\/a> with Anthropic\u2019s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web \u2014 and not for the first time<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUnless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version\u2026 [and] you\u2019re also having it within a browser that\u2019s not tracking you, the answer is no,\u201d Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo<\/em>. \u201cYou can\u2019t be sure that it\u2019ll be totally private.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn\u2019t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn\u2019t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/futurism.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ai-chatbot-users-darkest-thoughts-public-privacy.jpg?quality=85&w=1152\")
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