How is our personal and our company's data used to train ChatGPT? This can be avoided with the click of a button

 

"Artificial intelligence has become so naturally integrated into our everyday lives that many people, without even thinking, when a work or household issue arises, when they run out of ideas, open the chatbot ChatGPT, which is accessible to everyone, and its possibilities are practically limitless. But what do we know about the threats to the security of our confidential data? Experts say that there really are such.

Voldemaras Kadys, cybersecurity architect at NFQ Technologies, says that ChatGPT is most often associated with everyone as a tool for improving productivity.

“This artificial intelligence chatbot is used for personal and work purposes. It is important to note that in order to improve its quality and make it work even better, ChatGPT needs to be trained. We notice that newer and better versions of this tool are being released, which are trained on various data,” says V. Kadys.

According to him, first of all, these are synthetic data that are artificially generated, but efforts are made to make them look as real as possible, and then our personal data follows.

“Here is the bad news, because we enter everything there: personal problems, personal questions, as well as work problems, work questions. Some companies have ChatGPT business accounts, but most often everyone uses the free version, which is available to everyone,” says the interviewee.

According to him, the problem is that the privacy policy states that the data of those users who choose the free version that they enter can be used for training purposes.

“However, this can be solved, because the privacy policy also clearly states that if we do not want this, we can disable such an option, even in the free version.

All you need to do is select “do not train on my content” in your privacy settings,” the cybersecurity expert comments.

V. Kadys says that the situation is a little better for those with business accounts, because this button is automatically disabled there, but not everyone uses it.

“As a rule, this is not a cheap tool, because buying accounts for all employees so that everyone can freely use ChatGPT would be quite an expensive solution. So most people use the free version, and the conversation history can likely be used for artificial intelligence training purposes,” he warns.”