How to Use AI With Your Privacy Intact

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and their countless smaller competitors have become therapists, sounding boards, and virtual confession booths for millions of people around the world. Almost all of those AI models are set by default to collect and store that highly private data with, in many cases, no restrictions on how it’s shared or sold, used to further train the tools, or handed over to any lawsuit plaintiff or law enforcement agency that demands it through a legal process.

“You have this intelligent thing staring back at you, and you’re basically telling it, one question at a time, every possible thing there is to know about your life,” says Matt Green, a privacy- and security-focused computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “You're giving it this huge profile on you.”