ChatGPT Privacy Risk: Canada Joins Italy in Investigating Over Potential GDPR Violations. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating OpenAI’s ChatGPT for allegedly collecting and using personal information without consent. Canada’s privacy commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, expressed his commitment to keeping up with technological advances and their effects on privacy. Italy has already banned ChatGPT while Germany, France, and Ireland are monitoring the situation to determine GDPR violations.
ChatGPT is a generative language app that went viral, attracting millions of netizens looking to generate all types of text. However, authorities are increasingly concerned about the privacy risks posed by the technology. The app was trained on vast amounts of text scraped from the internet, meaning it’s likely to have ingested some personal information. Concerns have been raised about data extraction and how OpenAI is storing or using the data.
Even though the personal information must have been publicly posted on the internet for the bot to ingest during training, ChatGPT could be used to help people find such information more easily. Some companies like Amazon have warned employees not to share confidential information with ChatGPT. There are concerns that the model could leak data, as demonstrated by an open-source library bug that temporarily caused the software to reveal snippets of other people’s conversations and payment data.
OpenAI’s Privacy Concerns:
OpenAI has already built a filter to stop its older GPT-3 model from spitting out people’s phone numbers. However, people might be handing over private, sensitive information to the model when they use it, and it’s not clear how OpenAI is using or storing the data. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner launched the investigation in response to a complaint about the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information without consent.
The investigation into OpenAI, the operator of ChatGPT, is ongoing, and no additional details are available at this time. The GPT-3.5 large language model powers ChatGPT and was trained on huge swaths of text scraped from the internet. The technology’s potential harm to minors under the age of 13 is also a concern. OpenAI has not disclosed how it plans to address these privacy issues.
AI technology and its effects on privacy are a priority for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Officials are concerned about the personal information that could be extracted by those querying the bot. ChatGPT’s popularity could increase the risk of privacy breaches, and OpenAI must address these concerns to regain user trust.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has attracted a lot of attention and scrutiny for its potential privacy risks. Concerns have been raised about the model’s data collection, use, and storage, as well as it’s potential to harm minors. While the investigation is ongoing, it’s clear that the issue of AI technology and privacy is an important one that needs to be addressed. OpenAI and other companies developing similar AI tools must prioritize privacy to ensure their technologies don’t harm users.
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