In an old Simpsons episode Lisa gets to visit the Teachers room, where all the staff are making fun of the children. Groundskeeper Willie is pantomiming Milhouse “Oh I am Milhouse, I tell all my secrets to Willie since I have no friends!” and the teachers laugh. Later something embarrassing happens to Milhouse and he immediately runs away crying “I have to tell this to Willie!”.
Inequality has eroded trust in society in ~50 years, a lot of the old models (heh) of how we see the world aren't relevant. It's hard to exist when everything around us is adversarial.
"multiple providers disclose sensitive conversation-derived artifacts — including titles, prompts, and screenshots — to third parties, often alongside persistent user identifiers that enable user attribution. We also find that some providers publicly expose conversation permalinks without access controls, allowing trackers to read the entire conversation."
Security by obscurity -- such an age old anti-pattern!
I believe many AI tools like Gemini generate publicly accessible URLs when we click "Share" on any chat conversation -- and expect users to then own the lifecycle of that link
Depending on how the link gets handled -- by the browser, device OS, any hooks/plugins/extensions, aggressive telemetry, social media url previews, preload/prefetch, wrapping and url shortening, etc as it reaches the intended user -- there are countless ways in which the URL can be indexed and scraped
There was a issue not long ago when Claude artifacts were indexed en-masse by Google and other search engines
This is shockingly lax approach to data security and privacy by design
The same assumptions are true about giving any human that shareable link. They could pass it on to anyone, screenshot it, paste it into their own session. This has been true since before "share with link" permissions on Docs and elsewhere.
If you click "provide a shareable link" you should decide (and behave) as though that made it public.
I'm not saying it's good privacy posture on the side of the companies, but how else do you think that would work if there isn't any authentication step for the person viewing it? Even with authentication, "three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
You already have bigger problems then. Most people have given any number of plugins, etc., access to peek at browser history, clipboards, etc and didn't realize it. Run an ad blocker? VPN? Check out the permissions those sorts of things have on your device.
Thank you. I keep saying this and the spin doctors keep using words that imply "oh, my...I am so sorry we had that tiny little privacy issue...we'll get right on that in the next sprint...". And winning the message war.
It's not a 'leak'. It's in the T&Cs you agreed to. This is the business plan.
I have recently noticed that e.g. ChatGPT, when used from a web browser, periodically sends unfinished prompts to their servers, namely to the `conversation/prepare` endpoint, without waiting for the user to actually send it.
This partial prompt data might potentially be used to "pre-warm" some kind of cache.
But it may also be used to track the user's writing cadence, error correction style and evolution of their stub ideas as they are being formulated into a prompt. I would assume that such data could also be sold to the advertisers.
This is a bit surprising to me, considering how much AI companies love to hoard data. Especially since some of these ad companies are direct competitors!
My best guess is that these ad mechanisms are a bit rushed and/or that investor demands for profitability are fighting against company self-interest.
Edit: I guess some data will always need to be leaked for AI chat ads to be most effective. But I imagine AI companies would rather deliver the targeted ads themselves rather than letting competitors do it for them. It would be scary to see AI companies become ad companies too (instead of just hosting them).
I'm taking an onboarding process for an Ai company helping other (much) bigger Ai companies and the amount of vibecoded platforms and documentation is staggering. Like, training process so broken that the platform just doesn't load sometimes, things that have never even been tried are published and you have to use them and they suck so much because it is apparent that no human ever touched that and probably wouldn't want to
So I only read the abstract, but the question is if the data is leaked, by accident, or if it's deliberately provided. My guess is that we're talking about the first scenario, and that this is an accident.
If that's the case, then I'm not surprised at all. Actually I also wouldn't be surprised if they sold the data, but that's a different story. If we look at OpenAI for instance, they have on multiple occasion shown that they do not have the operational experience or resources to run their services in a safe and secure manor, nor do they frankly have an impressive up reliability (in terms of operational stability).
I'd support your guess that all of this is rushed in an attempt to push for profitabilitet/growth.
the question is if the data is leaked, by accident, or if it's deliberately provided. My guess is that we're talking about the first scenario, and that this is an accident.
Read the T&Cs. If there's even the tiniest bit of "we might provide your data to third parties for the purposes of...", it's not an accident. Virtually all the AI company T&Cs I've looked at had weasel words that open that door, because it's obvious to anyone paying attention that cramming ads into AI products is the next frontier in AI revenue streams.
Well, some data is deliberately provided at least. It's not a situation of other apps managing to grab the data like the facebook-localhost exploit
>The most prevalent third-party services included in CSP headers belong to Google Tag Manager (googletagmanager.com), Google Analytics (google-analytics.com), and Google Ads (googleadservices.com and doubleclick.net). Yet, as Table 8 shows, CSP policies commonly include other prominent actors in the advertising industry, such as TikTok and Meta.
It's the same lesson as the Navier-Stokes credit fight earlier this month. Buckmaster and Alpoge had their unpublished drafts in private Codex sessions and OpenAI says nobody saw them but admits de-identified product data may have improved its models. There it's training data, here it's ad trackers. Either way, prompts and results that should stay private don't.
Thats why even though open models aren't perfect it has to win. You can skip the app and run the model yourself.
A lot of people seem to be very in denial about the fact that OpenAI and co do not give a crap about you. They don't care about the agreements you've signed. You're just a pile of cash to them
Ad-tech spent 20 years trying to infer intent from clickstreams. Chat apps now hand over an AI-written one-line summary of intent, labeled and keyed to a cookie. Are we sure the ads business model in AI is about ads in the chat, and not the chat as the targeting signal?
I'd be kind of surprised if OpenAI were really doing this deliberately because a whole bunch of their execs come from Meta, and all those guys learned the hard way.
First: You don't want to leak information about your users to advertising networks because it's going to leak, get back to your customers, they're going to figure out you're doing it and get really angry.
But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.
The way meta does this now is the model, they don't give the advertiser a list of the people you're going to show the advert to, the advertiser gives you a list of characteristics they want to hit and meta decides who those people are.
> First: You don't want to leak information about your users to advertising networks because it's going to leak, get back to your customers, they're going to figure out you're doing it and get really angry.
And then they will keep using your digital drugs like nothing happened and forget about the whole thing. So watch out, executive!
> But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.
Perhaps, but getting to the saturated market on this might be something LLM labs simply don’t have time for. They are haemorrhaging money, no path to profitability and OpenAI especially has made ridiculous promises on data centre -spending for the coming year. They need money now.
> a whole bunch of their execs come from Meta, and all those guys learned the hard way.
Apparently they have not learned, or they learned the wrong lesson. I do not think they leak it intentionally as hoarding is typically more profitable than selling but anyone who has been in the industry for some time knows that the move fast and break things attitude has caused enormous amounts of data leaks.
Entire conversations via exposed permalinks. For Grok: trackers receiving the conversation URL could access the full chat because the link lacked access controls.
Screenshots of conversations. TikTok received screenshots of Grok chats during sharing, exposing the actual visible conversation content.
Conversation-derived content tied to persistent identifiers, including prompts and automatically generated chat titles revealing sensitive facts. "Salary 85k NYC: mortgage 280–350k".
We have all become Milhouse now.
Not good at all.
Perplexity does this. Visiting a past perplexity search url exposes your full conversation.
I believe many AI tools like Gemini generate publicly accessible URLs when we click "Share" on any chat conversation -- and expect users to then own the lifecycle of that link
Depending on how the link gets handled -- by the browser, device OS, any hooks/plugins/extensions, aggressive telemetry, social media url previews, preload/prefetch, wrapping and url shortening, etc as it reaches the intended user -- there are countless ways in which the URL can be indexed and scraped
There was a issue not long ago when Claude artifacts were indexed en-masse by Google and other search engines
This is shockingly lax approach to data security and privacy by design
If you click "provide a shareable link" you should decide (and behave) as though that made it public.
I'm not saying it's good privacy posture on the side of the companies, but how else do you think that would work if there isn't any authentication step for the person viewing it? Even with authentication, "three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
It’s not like someone’s gonna guess that URL… right?
I also accidentally paste random stuff into input boxes all the time.
Although I think at the point of some on-device program reading your browser history against your will, you’re gonna have bigger problems.
The amount of sensitive information that accidentally gets left on screenshots is pretty large. This is a pretty massive security issue
It's not a 'leak'. It's in the T&Cs you agreed to. This is the business plan.
I have recently noticed that e.g. ChatGPT, when used from a web browser, periodically sends unfinished prompts to their servers, namely to the `conversation/prepare` endpoint, without waiting for the user to actually send it.
This partial prompt data might potentially be used to "pre-warm" some kind of cache.
But it may also be used to track the user's writing cadence, error correction style and evolution of their stub ideas as they are being formulated into a prompt. I would assume that such data could also be sold to the advertisers.
My best guess is that these ad mechanisms are a bit rushed and/or that investor demands for profitability are fighting against company self-interest.
Edit: I guess some data will always need to be leaked for AI chat ads to be most effective. But I imagine AI companies would rather deliver the targeted ads themselves rather than letting competitors do it for them. It would be scary to see AI companies become ad companies too (instead of just hosting them).
If that's the case, then I'm not surprised at all. Actually I also wouldn't be surprised if they sold the data, but that's a different story. If we look at OpenAI for instance, they have on multiple occasion shown that they do not have the operational experience or resources to run their services in a safe and secure manor, nor do they frankly have an impressive up reliability (in terms of operational stability).
I'd support your guess that all of this is rushed in an attempt to push for profitabilitet/growth.
Read the T&Cs. If there's even the tiniest bit of "we might provide your data to third parties for the purposes of...", it's not an accident. Virtually all the AI company T&Cs I've looked at had weasel words that open that door, because it's obvious to anyone paying attention that cramming ads into AI products is the next frontier in AI revenue streams.
>The most prevalent third-party services included in CSP headers belong to Google Tag Manager (googletagmanager.com), Google Analytics (google-analytics.com), and Google Ads (googleadservices.com and doubleclick.net). Yet, as Table 8 shows, CSP policies commonly include other prominent actors in the advertising industry, such as TikTok and Meta.
Who thinks OpenAI or any big company for that matter give a crap about them? This isn't a popular sentiment at all, it's just patently false.
First: You don't want to leak information about your users to advertising networks because it's going to leak, get back to your customers, they're going to figure out you're doing it and get really angry.
But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.
The way meta does this now is the model, they don't give the advertiser a list of the people you're going to show the advert to, the advertiser gives you a list of characteristics they want to hit and meta decides who those people are.
And then they will keep using your digital drugs like nothing happened and forget about the whole thing. So watch out, executive!
> But second and more importantly - it's a much better business model to collect that data for yourself, keep it in house and then you control how you use that data to target ads which gives you a massive competitive advantage in selling ads because you have unique targeting data.
Perhaps, but getting to the saturated market on this might be something LLM labs simply don’t have time for. They are haemorrhaging money, no path to profitability and OpenAI especially has made ridiculous promises on data centre -spending for the coming year. They need money now.
Apparently they have not learned, or they learned the wrong lesson. I do not think they leak it intentionally as hoarding is typically more profitable than selling but anyone who has been in the industry for some time knows that the move fast and break things attitude has caused enormous amounts of data leaks.
Access through: https://ai.ivx.run/chat/
Someone should have to investigate, but I suppose it's all "legal"?
In EU law it is very likely against GDPR.
What happened? Oh no!
How terrible! That’s just, that’s just awful!
How terrible! Oh no!
Screenshots of conversations. TikTok received screenshots of Grok chats during sharing, exposing the actual visible conversation content.
Conversation-derived content tied to persistent identifiers, including prompts and automatically generated chat titles revealing sensitive facts. "Salary 85k NYC: mortgage 280–350k".