UPDATE 3/22: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirms that a glitch briefly caused ChatGPT to leak the conversation histories of random users earlier this week. He blames the exposure on "a bug in an open source library," and says a patch has been released, but the chat history sidebar remains inaccessible.
UPDATE: Some users also report the payment page for ChatGPT Plus possibly exposing email addresses that belong to random users. OpenAI says it's investigating the issues.
Original story:
Your recent ChatGPT queries may have accidentally leaked to other users.
ChatGPT shows a history of the past prompts you entered into the AI program on its chat history sidebar. But on Monday, some users spotted conversation histories that were not their own.
The discrepancy was especially stark for a user on Reddit who spotted conversations conducted in Chinese. Others saw the issue and immediately feared their accounts had been hacked.
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. So it’s unclear if ChatGPT was truly surfacing chat histories from other profiles, or if the program was simply making up the past prompts. But OpenAI reported an outage for ChatGPT at around 10 a.m. PST after users noticed the problem with chat histories.
The apparent bug is stirring concerns about user privacy. If you entered any personal information in a chat history, then the error could potentially surface the same information to a stranger.
Fortunately, users who’ve encountered the problem say ChatGPT will only surface the title of the past chat—not the full prompt with all the details. If you click on a past chat, the program will fail to load them.
It also looks like in many cases ChatGPT will only surface generic terms when showing chat histories possibly taken from past users, omitting any personally identifiable information. Thus, it should be unclear which person the chat history came from.
That said, the apparent bug underscores a risk of using ChatGPT: like any public web service, it too can suffer a potential data breach. The privacy policy for OpenAI also notes it can share “aggregated information like general user statistics with third parties, publish such aggregated information or make such aggregated information generally available.”