Chat GPT has over 900,000,000 (that’s million) weekly users. If you’re among these, you might consider AI your right-hand-man—er—bot.  These handy chatbots seem to know everything about anything and are always there when you need them.

As you continually utilize these chatbots, however, you’re often unknowingly giving them access to increasingly-personal information. If you’ve fallen into this trap, there are some ways out and a few steps you can take to limit the exposure of and reclaim your privacy.

1. Turn off data controls

Perhaps the first thing you should do is open up your settings and opt out of the optional data that is used for “training” purposes. To do so:

Go to Settings > Data controls > Improve the model for everyone.

Toggle all these switches off and hit “Done”.

2. Delete your old chats

While you may want to keep certain old chats around, if you’ve ever had ones that disclose any personal information you’d rather not the bot have access to, going back and deleting the old chats is a good way to clean that up. You can delete any chats individually by clicking on the “three dots” next to each chat’s name.

If you don’t wish to keep any old ones and would prefer to knock them all out in one swoop then instead go to:

Settings > Data controls > Delete all chats.

Note that even once it disappears from your history it can still take up to 30 days to be deleted from the OpenAI servers, so your mileage may vary.

3. Switch to using temporary chats

A far simpler solution to deleting individual chats moving forward is to instead utilize temporary chats. These won’t show up in your history, reference anything outside that conversation, and will not use itself for training data, either. Think of this as browsing in an incognito window.

Note that using temporary chats will feel less personalized, so if that is something you prefer then you can skip this step.

4. Manage chat memories

In order to disable which memories Chat stores, you’ll need to manage them via the settings. Go to:

Settings > Personalization > Memory

Click on “Manage” and you’ll be able to tweak and tune this to your preference.

Once again, it’s worth nothing that OpenAI will probably hang onto this data for up to 30 days.

Bonus step 5. Delete your account

If all else fails and you really don’t want Chat knowing anything about you, this is the final and permanent solution. By deleting your account and waiting the 30ish days for OpenAI to purge it from their database, you’ll be moving forward on a clean slate.

In order to delete your account:

Settings > Account > Delete Account

Clicking on “Delete” and confirming this action means that you’ll soon be Chat-free.

Final thoughts

If you’re every curious how much Chat knows about you, simply ask it. As long as you are specific, it should provide you with a comprehensive list of all the personal information you’ve shared with it. This can help inform your decision if you decide to move forward with any of these steps.

Lastly, if you have any other questions about using AI, the risks, challenges, or even dangers, then give our support team a call and pick their brain; they’ll be happy to keep you better informed.