How Long Does ChatGPT Remember My Data? | Accurate Privacy Information

ChatGPT
,
1

EDIT June 2025:
This changes everything mentioned in the original post. Please review the following article to understand the current privacy implications.
https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/

Original Post March 2025:
There’s confusion around how ChatGPT manages user data amongst casual or non tech-savvy users as its mostly hidden in privacy policy or terms and conditions documents.

Here’s important information as of March 2025:

  • Data Retention: ChatGPT retains your conversations indefinitely unless you actively delete them from your history.
    Retaining information is not the same as training models on the chats.
    Practically, your conversation remains visible in your account until you delete it, but OpenAI can still store logs behind the scenes (especially for safety or legal reasons).

  • Training Usage: ChatGPT conversations may be used to train OpenAI models unless you explicitly opt-out through the privacy portal or your account settings. Once opted out, future conversations won’t be used for training. Source: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is-used-to-improve-model-performance
    It’s worth pointing out that according to the article as of March, 2025, OpenAI has mechanisms to exclude personal information from the training data. But there is not much details mentioned about the process.
    Thoughts: Do they remove passwords we might have shared? Do they remove hashes? Filenames? File locations from error logs? (Please point out if there is any information available about this)
    Even if you opt out, OpenAI may use “de-identified” or “aggregated” data for analytics and to improve overall systems (the Privacy Policy allows that). This does not go into the training data set per se, but it’s still used for internal evaluation or system improvements.

  • Temporary Chat: Using Temporary Chat mode ensures your conversations won’t appear in history or be used to train models.
    Pro tip: If you’re extremely privacy-conscious, use “temporary chats” or regularly clear your chat history.

  • API vs. Individual Use: Unlike OpenAI’s API (which does not train on data by default), individual services like ChatGPT, DALL·E, Sora, and Operator use conversations for training unless users opt-out.
    For context: OpenAI’s API is a different service compared to ChatGPT where you can customize the parameters of OpenAI models like GPTs, o-series, dall-e, whisper etc and use them in your own Application/Website/Service/etc.

To protect your privacy:

Stay informed and manage your privacy settings actively!

Please note: Some policies may differ based on regions. This is in no way a comprehensive information about the policies, the aim is to make required information easily accessible to casual users. Please review the following documents to review complete information.

Source:

  1. https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use/
  2. https://openai.com/policies/data-processing-addendum/
  3. https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
2

I need to process 10,000 CVs… Can I be sure these people aren’t going to find their CVs in your system (via API)? What steps do I take to ensure the CVs can be processed and then nothing at all is stored, nor trained on, ever? Thanks

3

You can’t. As the original post says, they keep logs and those logs might contain snippets from the resumes.

4

Latest Updates:

  • As of March 2025 Users could control their data by actively deleting conversations. While logs might be kept for safety, a deleted chat would be permanently removed within a set timeframe (e.g., 30 days). The advice to “regularly clear your chat history” was the key privacy measure.

  • As of June 2025 Above is no longer true for most users. Due to a court order, OpenAI is now legally required to retain all consumer ChatGPT and standard API content indefinitely, even if the user deletes it . The action of deleting a chat now only removes it from the user’s interface, but the data is preserved in a separate, secure system for legal purposes.

Affected Users: ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, as well as API users without a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreement.

Unaffected Users: ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and API customers with a Zero Data Retention agreement are not impacted by this court order. For these users, the data handling policies described in the original post remain more or less accurate.

Validity of Privacy Tips from the Original Post

Original Post’s Privacy Tip Status After Latest Developments
“Opt-out of training via the privacy portal.” Still Valid. The court order does not affect training policies. Users can still control whether their data is used to train models. This remains a crucial privacy setting.
“Regularly clear your chat history.” No Longer Effective for Data Permanence. This action no longer leads to the permanent deletion of your data from OpenAI’s systems. It is now purely a cosmetic change for your own chat history view.
“Use ‘temporary chats’.” Likely Ineffective. The court order is described as sweeping (“all user content”). While not explicitly mentioned, it is highly probable that content from temporary chats is also being retained under this legal mandate, invalidating its purpose as a truly ephemeral chat mode.

Source: https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/

Question: Can anyone clarify what happens to the conversations deleted before the court order minus 30 days?

1 Like
5

The image displays a 'Temporary Chat' notice on ChatGPT, explaining that the chat won't appear in history, won't update memory or train models, and may be stored for up to 30 days for safety purposes. (Captioned by AI)
The image displays a 'Temporary Chat' notice on ChatGPT, explaining that the chat won't appear in history, won't update memory or train models, and may be stored for up to 30 days for safety purposes. (Captioned by AI)1492×729 26.6 KB

The message that appears when starting a new “temporary” chat seems to be misleading based on this post: https://openai.com/index/response-to-nyt-data-demands/

Can anyone from OpenAI clarify?

6

I remember seeing on Grok that it was possible to delete any uploaded files too but its not possible on GPT I think.