OpenAI has been hit with a class action lawsuit in the U.S. alleging that the AI firm has been secretly disclosing sensitive user data to Big Tech players including Meta and Google. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court this week, suggests that OpenAI’s integrated tracking tools like Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics directly into ChatGPT’s code has led to unauthorized user data sharing.
The lawsuit has been filed by plaintiff Amargo Couture in the District Court of the Southern District of California. The filing claims that the tracking technologies allegedly embedded into ChatGPT’s code pose a major privacy risk as users have developed a habit of sharing personal problems and professional issues with LLMs like ChatGPT.
“So much information is put into ChatGPT that some sources estimate the average company leaks confidential material to ChatGPT hundreds of times per week,” said the lawsuit reviewed by The Coin Headlines.
The Couture v. OpenAI lawsuit alleges that these Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics have been discovered as integrated into the ChatGPT interface. These codes essentially monitor user behaviour and collect user data for to measure the effectiveness of targeted advertisements.
The plaintiff has said that everytime a user query is entered onto ChatGPT, these tracking tools send the URL of the page containing the summary and title of the chat to Meta or Google servers. Couture has substantiated her claims against OpenAI citing real-world examples.
The lawsuit, for instance, described how the ChatGPT website was able to “bridge” the plaintiff’s identity on different platforms after she used the same web browser for both ChatGPT as well as for her logged-in Facebook and Google accounts.
Consequently, she has claimed that after she entered sensitive queries about her health and finances on ChatGPT, OpenAI allegedly allowed Meta and Google to intercept that private information and link it directly to her personal, identifiable social media and search profiles without her consent.
“By failing to receive the requisite consent, Defendant breached its duties of confidentiality and unlawfully disclosed Plaintiff’s PII and confidential communications,” the lawsuit said.
A jury trial in the case is demanded.
A response from OpenAI to the lawsuit remains awaited for now. The company is already embroiled in a high stakes lawsuit with Elon Musk accusing it of damaging the company’s foundational idealogy of developing AI for the goodness of the mankind for a profit-driven corporate business model.
The development comes just a day after Meta launched an Incognito Chat mode for users to have private conversations with Meta AI. This technology uses confidential cloud ecosystems capable of isolating the target data. This prevents even Meta from accessing the chats during processing.
