What happens to what you share with AI (axios.com)

Imagine a chatbot built to keep you talking a little longer. To change your mind about something. Or persuade you to buy something. Now imagine it could draw on everything it knows about you — including the fears, insecurities and private details you shared in conversation — to do it. Why it matters: Few rules directly govern that scenario today, making AI companies' promises about how they use consumer data especially consequential. The big picture: In the first installment of Axios' "What they know about you" series , published in 2019, we examined the information major tech companies collected about their users. In 2024, we followed up with a look at what consumer data AI companies use to train their systems. This new series revisits those questions — and widens the lens. We'll examine not only whether a company uses consumer data to train future AI models, but also how it can use that data now: to personalize responses, retain a memory, recommend content or target advertising. Driving the news: AI companies are seeking access to data beyond the chat window. OpenAI last week announced an optional Computer History feature that lets ChatGPT retain a record of the apps and websites a person uses. Google, meanwhile, said last month it will use photos and other material people upload through Search to train its AI systems by default, though users can opt out. The upside is the potential for more useful, personalized AI. The tradeoff is giving companies a broader and more continuous view of users' lives. Between the lines : Chatbots can invite a kind of disclosure that search engines and social networks often do not. People use them to ask about health, money, work and relationships — potentially creating a more intimate record of their concerns. Meta, Google and OpenAI are all exploring different approaches to advertising on their chatbots. If consumer AI follows the path of search and social media, advertising could become a far more significant part of the business — creating an incentive for chatbot makers to increase engagement. What they're saying: "The AI era will increasingly be fueled by people voluntarily handing over their full digital lives to AI tools that promise to relieve their mental load or loneliness," Miranda Bogen, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told Axios. "The more a system knows about you, the easier it will be to make escalating requests for private details in a way that feels natural," Bogen said. "Without robust privacy protections, the incentive to monetize that knowledge will be hard to resist." Zoom in: Company policies vary considerably. Apple, for example, offers the most private option with Apple Intelligence requests on a user's device. It handles the requests it can on-device. For more demanding tasks, A pple uses Private Cloud Compute, a system it says uses data only to fulfill the request and does not make that content accessible to Apple. That approach can limit how much of a user's