AI and your privacy: data, training and opting out
What chatbots keep, how to stop your conversations training future models, how to delete your data, where prompts are processed, and how on device AI differs.
Everything you type into a chatbot leaves your device, gets processed on somebody else's servers, and may be stored, read by a human reviewer or used to train the next model. Which of those actually happens depends on the product, the plan you are on and settings you have probably never opened. This is where you find out what is kept about you and what you can switch off.
Read what a chatbot does with the details you paste in first, then where your prompts go after you press send. The memory feature is the one most people miss, because it builds a profile of you across conversations you thought were separate. Once you know what is being collected, turning off training on your chats takes a couple of minutes per account.
Deletion is the part that surprises people. Clearing a conversation from your screen is not the same as removing it from a backup or from a model that already learned from it, so read what deleting your AI data really means before you rely on it.
Articles in this hub
- What an AI chatbot does with the personal data you typeWhere your prompts go, how long providers keep them, who can read flagged conversations, and the categories of information you should never paste into a chatbot.
- Where your prompts actually go when you press sendThe journey of a prompt: device, provider, sub processors and region, why enterprise and consumer tiers differ, and how to tell where your text is being handled.
- AI memory and chat history: what the assistant keeps about youThe difference between chat history, memory and training data, what an assistant remembers between conversations, and how to see and control each one.
- How to stop your chats being used to train AI modelsWhere the training opt out lives in the main AI tools, why turning it off can disable chat history, and how it differs on free, paid and business accounts.
- How to delete your AI chat data and what deletion meansDeleting chats, deleting an account and opting out are three different things: what each removes, what is retained for abuse review, and the order to do them in.