Chatbots and your data

Ley Muller

3 days ago

1 min read

Private, paid and enterprise accounts | What rights you have, where your data goes, and who can see your prompts

Free and paid personal accounts are the same

Including "Teams" accounts, as offered by Claude.

These are all consumer accounts, meaning chatbot providers are selling directly to you as a consumer. All of your data, and all of your prompts, are owned by the chatbot provider. Even if your data is not being used to train a new model, it is being used by analyzed by the provider. And, unfortunately, it is being sold further.

You can't get that data back, even if you entered or uploaded data which wasn't yours: someone else's data, your organization's internal data, or even your own personal data.

Enterprise accounts give you more protection

As commercial accounts, your organization has signed a contract directly with a chatbot provider. The provider has contractural obligations around security, data privacy, and even fixing bugs that you identify.

Beware web-based applications

The Swedish government has recently banned access to the web-based versions of Claude and ChatGPT. As the paper below found, almost all web-based chatbots continue to collect and sell your data to third-party providers, even after you reject unnecessary cookies.

If you are using an enterprise account, you're hopefully using a stand-alone application - keep using this!

Drawing from an excellent recent analysis: Prompt like a Butterfly, Sting like a Tracker: A Privacy Analysis of Web and Mobile Conversational AI Agents

News broken by SVT: AI-tjänster spärras på Regeringskansliet | SVT Nyheter