AI platforms are the final boss of data collection. Even before AI came into play, companies were skilled in tracking every move you make online. But AI took that to another level because people are literally telling it everything about themselves, even things they wouldn’t post online.
Initial models were trained on vast amounts of public internet data. But as more users came to AI platforms, their interactions became a centerpiece for training future models. Even though the internet itself is updated daily with oceans of new content, personal interactions still give companies better insights into how people think and communicate.
Right now, companies mostly use your data for training their AI models. They do not sell your data to third parties and advertisers. OpenAI does show ads to certain ChatGPT subscribers, but the platform decides which ads to show internally, without sharing actual chat data with outsiders.
That doesn’t mean these policies won’t change in the future. Google’s own privacy policy statement (linked below) regarding using Gemini data for targeted ads says the following:
“Your Gemini Apps chats are not being used to show you ads. If this changes, we will clearly communicate it to you.”
