In a privacy snafu, OpenAI has confirmed that a glitch briefly caused ChatGPT to leak the conversation histories of random users earlier this week.
“We feel awful about this,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Wednesday.
ChatGPT archives and displays your past conversations, giving you a running record of all your text inputs with the program. On Monday morning, some people noticed that the chat history function was showing unfamiliar past conversations seemingly from other people.
ChatGPT also experienced an outage on the same day. Initially, OpenAI remained mum on the situation, but on Wednesday, Altman finally confirmed the data exposure was real. “A small percentage of users were able to see the titles of other users’ conversation history,” he tweeted, without elaborating.
Although some feared the privacy snafu was caused by a hack, Altman blamed the problem on a software bug in an unnamed “open source library.” The good news is that OpenAI released a patch, which has been validated. But it looks like the company may have lost users’ chat histories for Monday, March 20.
“Unfortunately, users will not be able to access their chat history from monday 1 am PDT until monday 10 am PDT,” Altman said, the same timeframe the bug occurred.
The company plans on providing more details through a “technical postmortem,” Altman added. In the meantime, the conversation history sidebar has been down for ChatGPT since Monday.
It remains unclear whether the bug exposed anyone’s sensitive personal information. But Altman’s tweet says only the “titles” of other users’ conversation histories were exposed, not necessarily the full contents. Users who tried to click on the exposed chat histories reported experiencing an error that prevented full disclosure. The leaked titles also contained no apparent indication of who the chat history belonged to.
Despite Altman's tweet, OpenAI has yet to address another apparent bug that caused the payment form for ChatGPT Plus to seemingly leak the email addresses for other users on Monday morning. The company hasn’t responded to requests for comment.