If you’re curious about ChatGPT but nervous about all the potential privacy risks involved with talking to an AI chatbot, you’re in luck. This week, OpenAI introduced the ability to turn off chat history in ChatGPT. When you turn off chat history, conversations you have with the AI chatbot won’t be used to train and improve OpenAI’s language models, and they won’t appear in your history sidebar on the left side of the ChatGPT website.
“We hope this provides an easier way to manage your data than our existing opt-out process,” OpenAI said in a blog post on Tuesday announcing the privacy feature. “When chat history is disabled, we will retain new conversations for 30 days and review them only when needed to monitor for abuse, before permanently deleting.”
How to disable chat history in ChatGPT
If you want to take advantage of the new feature, navigate to chat.openai.com and log in to your OpenAI account. Next, click your profile picture in the bottom-left corner of the site. Click on Settings, then Show next to Data Controls and turn off the toggle next to Chat History & Training. This will deactivate chat history until you turn it back on again.
Unless you frequently reference previous conversations with ChatGPT, it might be in your best interest to deactivate your chat history. Just remember that as soon as you close that window, the conversation will vanish forever and cannot be recovered in the future.
Other announcements
In addition to launching a private mode, OpenAI announced a ChatGPT Business subscription for professionals who want more control over their data and enterprises that need to manage a significant number of end users. Most importantly, ChatGPT Business will not use user data to train OpenAI’s models by default, so companies won’t have to worry about employees accidentally leaking important information while chatting with ChatGPT.
The ChatGPT Business subscription will be available in the coming months.
OpenAI also revealed a new export option in the Settings menu, which should make it easier to retrieve data from ChatGPT. If you choose to use this new feature, you will receive a file with your conversations and any other relevant data in an email.
