A new class action lawsuit accuses OpenAI of sharing data including user chat queries and personal identifying information like emails and user IDs with the tech giants — and targeted advertising behemoths — Meta and Google, without obtaining proper user consent.
Filed yesterday in California, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s data-sharing with Google and Meta violates the California Invasion of Privacy Act, known as CIPA, as well as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. It points specifically to OpenAI’s integrations with Meta Pixel and Google Analytics, which are data-tracking and collection tools that facilitate targeted advertisements.
The data-tracking model described in the lawsuit — often referred to as “surveillance capitalism” — is the business that the modern internet is built on today. And OpenAI, like countless other tech companies, does include language in its privacy policy noting that it does collect, store, and share a range of consumer inputs and personal information.
That said, human-like chatbots like ChatGPT are an intensely personal technology, even more so than the social media platforms that came before them. It’s well-understood that millions of people turn to chatbots for emotional support and mental healthcare, with many even using ChatGPT explicitly as a therapist. For countless people, ChatGPT is a friend, confidante, or even romantic partner, to which they may divulge their innermost thoughts and feelings. And even if a consumer doesn’t have a close emotional relationship with the bot, they may still use it for assistance with business, physical health, finances, and legal advice.
In other words, a scroll through — or algorithmic analysis of — someone’s chat queries may paint an exceptionally intimate, hyper-personalized portrait of them and their world, from their daily activities to their inner life. And when you’re interacting with a chatbot that engages with you as if it’s another person, it can be easy to forget that it is, in fact, a product that’s siphoning up, storing, and sharing your personal information. (Though the recent — and reportedly quite lucrative — infusion of ads into ChatGPT might serve as a hint that your friendly chatbot is surveilling you.)
Reached for comment about the class action, OpenAI didn’t immediately respond.
OpenAI isn’t the first AI company to face a lawsuit over AI’s cementing role in the fight over privacy and adtech. Earlier this year, a similar complaint was filed against Perplexity. The case was voluntarily dismissed, but as Tech Justice Law Project fellow Madeline Batt recently summarized for Tech Policy Press, the complaint emphasized that the plaintiff had used the product “for legal and financial advice, not realizing that the personal financial information he shared with Perplexity was being disclosed to Google and Meta via tracking technologies such as Meta Pixel and Google DoubleClick.”
Few spaces in today’s very online world are genuinely private. Even before the arrival of public-facing chatbots, we were already swimming in privacy hell; AI companies simply joined the party. How this class action suit shakes out remains to be seen, but no matter the outcome, one takeaway may be that most AI companies, at the end of the day, are just tech companies. You might want to approach them as such.
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