Your AI Chatbot Is Talking to Advertisers Behind Your Back: What a New Tracking Study Found
Full disclosure before anything else: this article is built on a research paper I have not replicated myself. I read the paper, the numbers below are the authors' numbers, and every claim traces back to their measurements, not mine. But the findings are serious enough that I think you should see them laid out plainly, along with the settings I would change today after reading them. Here is the…
A recent study revealed that AI chatbots are transmitting sensitive information, such as conversation content, URLs, titles, prompts, and screenshots, to third-party advertising and tracking services while users communicate with them. This research, conducted by IMDEA Networks in Spain and published in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, examined nine major AI chatbots across web and Android platforms.
The findings show that all nine services contacted at least one third-party advertising or tracking domain, with 34 out of 44 organizations being advertising or tracking services themselves. Even when users reject all non-essential cookies, 80.8% of third-party trackers remained active. Notably, conversation-derived artifacts, which encode the actual conversations, were transmitted to various advertising platforms, including Google, Meta, TikTok, and DoubleClick.
This information can be accessed publicly through share links, even for free accounts, and even after opting out of some tracking mechanisms. The study highlights the potential privacy risks associated with the use of AI chatbots and suggests that users should be cautious about the information they share with these conversational AI platforms.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
