We tell chatbots things we’d never put in a search box
Yesterday I checked a month worth of conversation with one of my AI (yes it was claude).
This month alone i shared with Anthropic my blood test results to figure em out and some legal contracts (back and forth) that I wanted to revise both manually and thru mr claude to double check. Those were the most sensitive ones among other information i sent within conversations. Search engines already knew a lot about me, i see that from ADs tailored to my preferences. Companies like this go beyond knowing your liking, with context, including private things.
I don’t necessarily think that makes anyone a villain, as this is roughly the same trade we made with email and maps and photos, and most of us took it (I did at least) without much hesitation. What I notice is that I never actually decided how I feel about it, as it is me who decides what to share with them (more or less). So my question to you is where’s your line? Do you think about what goes in, or is this a trade you’ve already made? If none of it left your machine, what would you ask that you don’t ask now? (you don’t have to be specific haha)
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I see it from the builder side too. My app takes a description of a song, and people type names, family stories, the person they are making it for. So the rule in my project is that the app's own logs say what happened and never what someone wrote: no lyrics, no typed text, and taps are logged by a fixed control name, never by a title the user gave. It is a small thing, but it means a log shared for debugging can't leak someone's story. I think your point holds for every product with a text box now: the box invites more than a search field ever did, and the builder decides how much of it outlives the request.