People commonly disclose all kinds of personal data to AI chatbots, including the highly inadvisable practice of asking them for health advice. In addition to the grave medical dangers of obtaining inaccurate advice, users are also running significant privacy risks.
Most AI chatbots have terms and conditions that allow any of your conversations with them to be used as training data, and often app terms that allow data to be collated and sold. Democrats now propose to update a privacy law to prevent the sale of health data …
The Verge reports that two members of Congress are now planning to introduce legal protections to ban the sale of health data collected in AI chatbot sessions.
As the piece notes, this is particularly timely when AI companies are actively encouraging users to upload health data.
9to5Mac’s Take
I’ve argued countless times that the US needs a federal privacy law with the breadth and bite of the EU’s GDPR. Piecemeal legislation like this is better than nothing, but will always leave the law lagging behind technology.
Given the unreliability of generative AI, it would be exceedingly foolish to take any health advice from a chatbot. Don’t do it. But if you want to have other sensitive discussions with a chatbot, Siri would be the way to go. Both the existing Siri handoff to ChatGPT and the new Siri AI use of Google Gemini models are subject to strict Apple privacy requirements that forbid the collection of user data.
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- NordVPN – privacy-first VPN with no logs and independent audits to verify
Photo by julien Tromeur on Unsplash
