Comment by baobun
4 hours ago
They could have been stored at the client, and encrypted before optionally synced back to OpenAI servers in a way that the stored chats can only be read back by the user. Signal illustrates how this is possible.
OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.
Signal does End-to-end encryption, so they (Signal) can never read it.
The whole point of ChatGPT conversations is so they can be read by the model on the server.
Conversations are kept around because they can be picked up and continued at any point (I use this feature frequently).
Additionally you can use conversations in their scheduled notification feature, where the conversation is replayed and updates are sent to you, all done on the server.
> OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.
Indeed they did, and it was a sensible choice given how the conversations are used.
People are responding in this thread as if ChatGPT is a one-on-one conversation with another person. The data isn’t “shared” with OpenAI. You’re chatting with OpenAI. ChatGPT is just a service. There’s no way to use ChatGPT without sharing all of your chats with OpenAI, that’s what the entire product is.
This doesn’t sound realistic. Signal is end to end encrypted and only sends one message at a time, while ChatGPT needs the entire chat context for every message and they need to decrypt your messages in their services in order to feed them into the LLM.
> Our long-term roadmap includes advanced security features designed to keep your data private, including client-side encryption for your messages with ChatGPT. We believe these features will help keep your private conversations private and inaccessible to anyone else, even OpenAI.
This sort of thing is pretty trivial to implement from the start, they just chose not to because they wanted the data themselves
Hah. I seriously doubt it is even close to trivial. Especially when they are to exist on any device you use the service from.