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:
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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:
- Opt-out of training via the privacy portal. Link: https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
- Also, you can turn off training models on your data on this page: https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls
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.
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