Does ChatGPT Save Your Data?

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a powerful language model, is driving innovation across industries with its remarkable text generation and natural conversation capabilities. Alongside its meteoric rise, legitimate concerns regarding ChatGPT's data handling practices have also emerged.

One such vulnerability surfaced in May 2023 when OpenAI reported a data breach in ChatGPT. The incident raises a critical question - can you trust ChatGPT with your sensitive data? This article aims to answer just that and show you how to fully use this technology without compromising security. 

✨What types of data does ChatGPT store?

ChatGPT collects and stores two main categories of data: information received automatically and information actively provided by users.

The data ChatGPT receives automatically includes:

• Device data: Information about the device and operating system used to access ChatGPT
• Usage data: Details about location, time, and version of ChatGPT used
• Log data: IP address and browser information

The data users actively provide includes:

• Account information: Name, email address, and contact details
• User content: All prompts, questions, and queries entered into ChatGPT
• Uploaded files and feedback provided during interactions

It’s important to note that ChatGPT retains conversation data for 30 days for monitoring purposes. This retention period can pose potential security risks, as stored data may become vulnerable to attacks. Users should be mindful about transmitting sensitive information during their interactions with ChatGPT.

For businesses concerned about data security, Strac’s ChatGPT DLP solution offers proactive safeguarding of sensitive information during ChatGPT interactions.

Does ChatGPT sell data?

No, ChatGPT does not sell user data. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has explicitly stated in its privacy policy that it does not sell user data or share content with third parties for marketing purposes. This commitment to data privacy is an essential aspect of OpenAI’s business model and user trust.

However, it’s crucial to understand that while OpenAI doesn’t sell data, it does use the information collected for various purposes, including:

• Providing and improving services
• Communicating with users
• Ensuring compliance with legal requirements
• Conducting research and analysis
• Enhancing security and preventing fraud

While these uses provide OpenAI with significant latitude in how it handles user data, the company maintains that it does not monetize this information through direct sales to third parties.

For organizations looking to enhance their data protection strategies, Strac’s SaaS DLP solution offers comprehensive protection across various cloud applications, including AI platforms like ChatGPT.

Chrome Extension DLP. Chat GPT DLP: Detect & Redact PII and Sensitive Data like PHI, PCI

✨How does ChatGPT use my data?

ChatGPT uses the data it collects primarily to improve its AI model and enhance user experience. Here’s how ChatGPT utilizes user data:

1. Model Training: OpenAI uses the data to train and refine its language models, improving ChatGPT’s ability to generate more accurate & contextually relevant responses.
2. Personalization: User data helps tailor the ChatGPT experience to individual preferences and needs.
3. Service Improvement: The collected information is used to identify areas for improvement in the ChatGPT service.
4. Research and Development: OpenAI uses the data for ongoing research in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
5. Compliance and Security: User data helps in maintaining legal compliance and enhancing the security of the platform.

It’s important to note that users can opt out of having their data used for training purposes through OpenAI’s privacy portal. For enterprise users, the default setting is that input will not be used for training.

For businesses concerned about data usage in AI platforms, Strac’s Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) solution can help monitor and manage data security across various cloud services, including AI platforms.

Can ChatGPT see the data stored in a knowledge base?

When companies upload documents into a knowledge base, the biggest concern is whether ChatGPT can see, reuse, or learn from that data. ChatGPT Security Risks often arise from misunderstandings about how the underlying LLM interacts with enterprise knowledge sources. While OpenAI isolates user-provided files from model training, the model can still access the knowledge base during a conversation to generate responses. This means the risk is not model training but prompt exposure, over-sharing, and lack of access controls across SaaS applications that store your data. For enterprises, the real issue is ensuring that sensitive information in these knowledge bases is continuously discovered, classified, and governed.

Knowledge bases connected to ChatGPT function as “retrieval layers,” meaning the model can retrieve and read documents when responding. They are not used to train global models, but they are readable to the model while your session is active. Because many knowledge bases are linked to SaaS tools like Google Drive, Notion, Confluence, Slack, or internal wikis, sensitive data may be exposed unintentionally.

Strac helps reduce these ChatGPT Security Risks by:

• Scanning your knowledge bases and connected SaaS apps for PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, and confidential files
• Applying ML and OCR based classification to every document
• Redacting or masking sensitive data before it ever reaches a prompt
• Enforcing policies across connected tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard, or custom LLMs

Enterprises should treat any knowledge base connected to LLMs as part of their broader DSPM and DLP strategy. Strac integrates with both your SaaS platforms and your AI tools to ensure your knowledge layer remains safe, governed, and free from high-risk content.

✨Where does ChatGPT store your data?

ChatGPT stores user data on OpenAI’s secure servers. These servers are located in the United States, as stated in OpenAI’s privacy policy. The company implements diverse security measures to protect user data:

1. End-to-end encryption: This assures that data remains secure during transmission and storage.
2. Stringent access controls: Only authorized personnel can access user data, and this access is monitored and logged.
3. Regular security audits: OpenAI conducts frequent assessments to identify and address potential vulnerabilities.
4. Compliance with data protection regulations: ChatGPT adheres to various data security standards, including GDPR and CCPA.
5. Bug Bounty program: OpenAI incentivizes ethical hackers to identify and report security issues.

Despite these measures, it’s important to remember that no system is entirely immune to data breaches. Users should exercise care when transmitting sensitive information through ChatGPT.

For organizations looking to enhance their data security across various platforms, including AI services, Strac’s Sensitive Data Discovery and Classification solution can help identify and protect sensitive information across multiple cloud environments.

What Type of Data is Fed to ChatGPT by Employees?

ChatGPT collects and stores two types of data:

1. User-provided data: This includes the prompts and responses that users input into the system. Examples of user-provided data are questions asked by users, the context provided for those questions, and any feedback given on the responses. This can also include business data, such as confidential business information and trade secrets.
2. System-generated data: This includes metadata such as timestamps, usage statistics, and other operational data that help improve the performance and reliability of the service.

1. Automatically received information

This category encompasses data that ChatGPT collects automatically during your interaction with the AI:

• Device data: includes details about your device, such as the make and model and the operating system.
• Usage data: This covers your location when using ChatGPT, the specific version of the tool you are interacting with, and the time of your usage.
• Log data: The AI also saves technical data like your IP address and the browser type you are using to access the service.

2. User-provided data

In addition to the data received automatically, ChatGPT also saves the data you actively provide. Here’s what it includes:

• Account information: If you have a registered account, ChatGPT stores your personal info, such as your name, email address, and other contact information.
• User content: This includes the text of the prompts, questions, and queries you input into ChatGPT, along with any files you might upload during your interaction. It can also include more complex data types that users might inadvertently share, such as:
• PII (Personally Identifiable Information): Information used to identify an individual, like social security numbers or home addresses.
• Source code: Pieces of code that users might input for queries related to programming or software development.
• Email Drafts with sensitive customer data: Text from email drafts containing confidential business information.
• Other Sensitive Data: Any additional confidential information a user might input into ChatGPT, such as images, financial information, legal documents, trade secrets, etc.
• Chat history: ChatGPT also retains your chat history to enhance its language model and generate more accurate and contextually relevant responses.

Users can manage their data privacy settings through data controls, allowing them to opt-out of data training and disable chat history to protect their data.

What are the Risks Associated With Storing Sensitive Data in ChatGPT?

Recent findings show that 75% of cybersecurity professionals have noted a significant rise in cyber-attacks over the past year. Notably, 85% of these experts believe this escalation is primarily due to generative AI technologies like ChatGPT. Here are a few risks associated with ChatGPT storing your sensitive data.

• Potential for AI data security risks and breaches: Sensitive personal or business information stored by ChatGPT can become a target for cybercriminals, leading to privacy violations and financial losses. User conversations are stored on OpenAI's systems as well as the systems of trusted service providers in the US, raising concerns about access to user content and data privacy.
• Compliance and legal risks: For businesses, using ChatGPT involves compliance risks, especially regarding data protection laws like GDPR and CCPA.
• Accidental sharing of confidential data: 49% of companies presently use ChatGPT, 93% of whom say they plan to expand their chatbot use. The risk of inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information grows as adoption increases.
• Overreliance and data dependency: An overreliance on ChatGPT for data processing can create a dependency, increasing the risk of data manipulation or corruption and posing challenges in data management.
• Ethical concerns: The ethical implications of storing and using large volumes of data by AI systems like ChatGPT are also significant, raising questions about consent, data ownership, and privacy rights.

How to stop ChatGPT from keeping your data

Companies exploring how to stop ChatGPT from keeping your data typically want to prevent two things: model learning from prompts and long-term storage of sensitive information. While OpenAI provides user controls for turning off model training, this does not solve the enterprise-level problem. Data entered into ChatGPT can still remain in logs, be visible to administrators, or be accessible through API usage unless additional controls are in place. Organizations need layered safeguards that prevent sensitive information from entering the ChatGPT ecosystem at all.

To keep ChatGPT from retaining your data, organizations can follow these steps:

1. Disable model training in OpenAI settings for both browser and API usage
2. Use an enterprise-grade ChatGPT plan that offers stricter retention controls
3. Avoid connecting knowledge bases with sensitive files unless governed by DSPM or DLP
4. Restrict upload and file-sharing permissions across SaaS apps that connect to ChatGPT
5. Implement a DLP solution like Strac that blocks, redacts, or masks sensitive data in real time before it enters LLM prompts

Strac provides additional protection for enterprises by enforcing continuous Data Discovery and Classification across Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Notion, and other tools that often feed into ChatGPT. Using ML and OCR, Strac detects sensitive data before it ever reaches an LLM. With real-time redaction, blocking, or masking, Strac prevents employees from unintentionally submitting PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, tokens, or confidential files into ChatGPT.

Bottom line: the best way to stop ChatGPT from keeping your data is to prevent sensitive information from entering it in the first place.

✨What Makes Data Vulnerable Despite ChatGPT's Security Measures?

Despite OpenAI's robust security measures, such as end-to-end encryption, stringent access controls, and incentives for ethical hackers through a Bug Bounty program, data insecurity remains a pertinent issue. This is due to several inherent challenges in the way ChatGPT handles data.

1. Data retention policies

OpenAI allows users to delete chat history, yet it retains new conversations for 30 days for monitoring purposes. This retention period poses a risk, as the stored data becomes vulnerable to attacks.

2. Data usage to train AI

ChatGPT, a machine learning model, learns from the data it processes. While OpenAI asserts it doesn't use end-user data for model training by default, there's always a risk associated with accidentally or intentionally uploading sensitive data onto the platform.

3. Vulnerability to data breaches

No system is immune to data breaches, and ChatGPT, despite its security protocols, is not an exception to this risk. Instances of compromised ChatGPT account credentials circulating on the Dark Web underscore the potential for unauthorized access to the sensitive data that ChatGPT holds.

4. Third-party data sharing

There are concerns about ChatGPT potentially sharing user data with third parties for business operations without explicit user consent. This possibility of data sharing with unspecified parties adds another layer of risk regarding user privacy and data security.

Has ChatGPT had a data leak?

Concerns about whether ChatGPT has had a data leak continue to grow as enterprises evaluate AI adoption. ChatGPT Security Risks intensified in 2023 when OpenAI confirmed a bug that briefly exposed conversation histories to other users. Although it was not a breach of training data, it demonstrated how unpredictable LLM ecosystems can be when logs, sessions, and retrieval layers are not fully isolated. Since then, several security researchers have shown that prompt injection, training data extraction, and jailbreak attacks can reveal system-level information from LLMs.

Even when OpenAI secures its infrastructure, the most common source of data leaks is not the model itself but employees pasting sensitive data into prompts or connecting unsecured knowledge bases. This is why enterprises must treat LLMs as another SaaS surface that requires discovery, classification, and real-time policy enforcement.

Strac protects organizations from AI-related data leaks by:

• Scanning SaaS systems connected to LLMs for sensitive data
• Classifying PII, PHI, PCI, secrets, tokens, and confidential files
• Blocking or redacting sensitive content before it reaches ChatGPT
• Monitoring data access across Slack, Google Drive, Notion, Salesforce, and other knowledge sources that LLMs can read
• Providing unified DSPM and DLP visibility across AI, SaaS, Cloud, and endpoints

With Strac, organizations can safely adopt generative AI while minimizing the risk of accidental exposure, unauthorized access, or leakage of sensitive information through LLM interactions.

✨The Role of DLP in Securing Data from ChatGPT

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) tools protect sensitive data from vulnerabilities like cyber attacks, ransomware, data breaches, etc. DLP solutions often incorporate advanced machine learning algorithms to enforce data handling policies effectively. They allow you to maintain a robust security posture by blocking attempts to email sensitive materials, encrypting files from specific applications upon access requests, and implementing other preventive actions aligned with a company's policies.

Strac's DLP solution offers a user-friendly browser extension (Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox) that proactively safeguards sensitive information in every ChatGPT interaction. Let's explore its features and the step-by-step implementation process.

• Immediate risk alerts: Strac's system quickly identifies potential threats within ChatGPT interactions, allowing for timely responses to security concerns.
• Automated sensitivity analysis: The DLP solution employs AI technology to monitor ChatGPT content, flagging sensitive data sharing constantly.
• Real-time remediation of sensitive data: Strac instantly masks sensitive parts of the messages sent to ChatGPT to maintain user privacy and data integrity.
• Configurable security settings: Strac allows businesses to tailor data sensitivity rules for ChatGPT interactions, meeting diverse organizational needs.
• Compliance assurance: The solution ensures that interactions with ChatGPT comply with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Now, let's see how Strac's ChatGPT DLP functions:

1. Your IT team implements Strac's Chrome extension to detect and block sensitive data from being sent to sites like ChatGPT during web browsing.
2. Strac supports over 100 data elements, including financial and personal info. You can also configure it to block sensitive data per organizational policies.
3. When a user attempts to submit sensitive data, the Strac browser extension will trigger a pop-up alert and remediate sensitive PII.

The Strac Chrome extension isn't limited to ChatGPT; it seamlessly integrates with any website, showcasing its versatile application for data protection. Its wide-ranging utility is crucial for organizations handling sensitive data, providing a comprehensive approach to data security.

Bottom Line

ChatGPT Security Risks are not only about whether the model saves data. The real exposure begins long before a prompt is submitted and often lives inside the SaaS systems, files, messages, and knowledge bases employees rely on every day. Even with OpenAI’s retention controls, enterprises remain responsible for preventing sensitive information from entering ChatGPT in the first place. That requires continuous visibility, accurate classification, and automated policy enforcement across all connected applications and data sources.

Strac provides the strongest defense against ChatGPT Security Risks by discovering sensitive data across SaaS, Cloud, GenAI, and endpoints, classifying it with ML and OCR, and enforcing real-time redaction, masking, or blocking before it reaches an LLM. With unified DSPM and DLP from Strac, organizations can embrace generative AI confidently while maintaining full compliance and complete control over their data.

🌶️Spicy FAQs About ChatGPT Security Risks

How is my data protected under international privacy laws?

ChatGPT Security Risks are often tied to uncertainty about how data is handled under GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other global privacy regulations. These laws require transparency, purpose limitation, and clear controls over how personal data is processed. OpenAI provides certain protections, but enterprises must understand that compliance depends on the way they submit, store, and manage sensitive information when using ChatGPT. User prompts may still fall under regulated data categories if they contain names, IDs, health information, financial information, or internal company data.

To stay compliant, organizations should follow these practices:

• Map what sensitive data employees could accidentally input into ChatGPT
• Apply DSPM tools like Strac to detect and classify regulated data across SaaS apps
• Use DLP controls that block PHI, PII, PCI, secrets, or confidential files before reaching ChatGPT
• Limit which teams and roles have permission to use AI tools
• Log all AI interactions as part of your compliance audit trail

With Strac, companies can automatically enforce these controls across Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Notion, and other sources that commonly feed into ChatGPT usage.

What are the best practices for using ChatGPT safely in a business context?

Enterprises face significant ChatGPT Security Risks when employees paste sensitive information into prompts or upload documents without governance. Safe usage requires a structured approach that prevents accidental exposure while enabling productivity. The goal is not to block ChatGPT but to ensure every interaction follows the same security standards already applied to SaaS systems.

Best practices include:

• Train employees to avoid entering sensitive or regulated data into prompts
• Use enterprise ChatGPT versions with data retention controls
• Restrict access to knowledge bases that contain confidential files
• Monitor SaaS systems continuously to identify high-risk content before it is sent to ChatGPT
• Deploy Strac to block or redact risky data in real time

With these safeguards in place, businesses can use ChatGPT confidently without compromising compliance.

Is my data stored permanently when using ChatGPT?

Many organizations ask whether their data is stored permanently because ChatGPT Security Risks often relate to retention and visibility. OpenAI does retain some interaction data for a period unless you opt out of training and logging settings, but this does not mean your data is permanently stored. Logs may exist for security, abuse prevention, and auditing, and data uploaded into knowledge bases can remain accessible to the model during retrieval.

Retention depends on several factors:

• The plan you use
• Whether enterprise controls are enabled
• Whether you connected external knowledge sources
• Your internal data governance policies

Strac allows organizations to prevent sensitive data from ever entering ChatGPT, removing the risk of long-term retention concerns.

Does ChatGPT share data with third parties?

ChatGPT Security Risks include the possibility that data may be shared with service providers or subprocessors for operational purposes such as hosting, abuse detection, or security monitoring. OpenAI states that it does not sell data; however, data may still be accessible to authorized vendors depending on the infrastructure involved. This is standard across most cloud platforms, but it requires proper due diligence.

To ensure safety, businesses should:

• Review OpenAI’s list of subprocessors
• Enable enterprise controls that limit data exposure
• Avoid sending regulated data into prompts
• Use Strac to scan, classify, and redact sensitive information before it leaves your SaaS environment

With the right safeguards, the risk of unintended third-party exposure can be significantly reduced.

Can ChatGPT delete my data if I request it?

Organizations often want to know whether ChatGPT can delete data on request because retention and right-to-erasure are core requirements of GDPR and other privacy laws. OpenAI allows individuals and enterprise customers to request deletion of stored data depending on the plan and the data category. However, deletion applies only to stored interaction data and not to content sent from connected SaaS systems or knowledge bases.

This is why enterprises need additional controls:

• Sensitive data must be kept out of ChatGPT
• SaaS sources feeding into ChatGPT must be governed
• DSPM and DLP tools like Strac should be used to continuously remove or remediate risky information stored in upstream systems

By preventing sensitive data from entering ChatGPT in the first place, Strac ensures deletion requests are far simpler and more compliant with global privacy standards.