Have you ever given your password, medical report, confidential office document to an AI chatbot? If given, be careful. The privacy of information shared with the AI from which you are seeking answers to your questions depends on your settings and company policy. Data misuse, leaks or unauthorized access can put your personal information at risk.
Now people are using AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude for studying, office work, writing emails, coding and understanding the symptoms of diseases. Conversations are as if they were personal assistants or friends, not AI, and they even share their personal items. But how are your chats, uploaded files and personal information used? Is your data completely secure?
A study published in October 2025 by America’s Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI studied the privacy policies of six major American AI companies and found that all six companies’ policies had a default setting of improving models from training and user chats. However, data usage rules and options available to users vary between companies.
What happens to your chats?
When you write a question or upload a file to an AI chatbot, your data may be processed on the server of the company providing the service. Depending on the company’s privacy policy and your settings, this data may also be used to improve the service, test security or model training.
Cyber security expert Jiten Jain says that depending on the AI provider’s privacy policy and settings, your data may be processed on its servers and authorized service providers. Therefore, avoid uploading sensitive documents, passwords, financial records or unnecessarily identifying medical information.
Because AI systems can use communication to improve models. It depends on the service, settings and policy. There is a risk of unauthorized access to data, data leakage and accidental leakage of personal information. So, share only as much as is necessary with the chatbot.
Not every piece of information fed to the AI is automatically included in the training of the model. Just because data is processed on a server does not mean the data has become public. Privacy settings reduce risk but do not guarantee complete safety.
Why are there warnings about data leak cases?
SBI Data Leak: In October 2026, 3,897 of the 3.75 lakh records on the dark web contained information about customers’ names, phone numbers, emails and addresses. An investigation into how the data was leaked is underway.
Australian Government Portal: In June 2026, OpenAI’s AI agent made unauthorized entries to a government Medicare statistics portal.
Samsung Secret Code: In 2023, company employees uploaded confidential source code to ChatGPT to improve the code. After this the company imposed restrictions on the use of generative AI.
These cases show that data can be at risk not only from hacking but also from sharing sensitive information on AI tools.
How to protect data
ChatGPT: Open Data Controls in Settings and turn off model correction for everyone. New temporary chat conversations do not appear in the chat history and are not used to improve the model. However, the copy may be retained for 30 days for security reasons.
Cloud: Under Privacy in Settings, turn off the Help improving our AI models option. This prevents new conversations from being used in future model training.
Google Gemini: See the Keep Activity setting in Gemini Apps Activity. Disabling this affects how activity is saved and used, but some data may be retained for security or service-related reasons.
On each AI tool: Do not share password, bank details, Aadhaar number, medical report and confidential office documents. If work requires AI, use company-approved service and data policies.
AI chatbots are useful but should not be considered as digital lockers. Cyber security expert Jiten Jain advises that before sharing personal details, consider whether the information could be of use to you. Sharing less data is the easiest way to reduce risk.
A box of festive season offers, special deals on these products including the OnePlus 15 and Nord 6 series
